A drag-&-drop solution to add environmental effects to your PBR materials, and the building blocks to kickstart your own smart materials.
Pick one of the smart effects in the library, and drop-it on any of your materials. You can add moss, snow, dust, sand, leaks, water puddles, dead leaves, edge-wear, alien-growth ect.. And of course customize their parameters in a few clicks. Or create any other environmental effect by simply switching Shaders/textures with other ones in the Smartify library, or with your own.
You can also quickly create from scratch smart-effects/materials using the building blocks of Smartify in the library, smart masks like Facing, location, Ao, edges, leaking, and smart utilities like anti-tile, paralax mapping, random-per-object.
All effects can also be masked by painting on the vertex colors (or more precisely with an image texture), red will remove, green will force, and black will leave the smart masks operate.
Just Drag, Drop, & Tweak what you need !
Smartify Nodes focuses on user experience, readability & artistic control.
It’s as easy as possible to use, with colored nodes, sliders that feels just right, and an evocative naming convention. No obscure noodle mess or austere looking node groups with abstract slider values. It’s made by a concept artist & short-film director with little patience, for other artists who just want to hit the ground running when opening Blender !
Examples of current smart effects and materials:
[ click to open image ]
(For updates, simply extract the .Zip again,and you’ll have the new assets in your browser.)
Basic tutorial/demo, kitbashing your own smart materials:
Features Highlight:
– A growing library of smart effects & materials :
– Fully compatible with custom materials, procudural ect.. it’s just nodes, so no exotic hotkeys to learn, or code errors.
– Paint overides, vertex/texture paint to block or force an effect on your meshes:
– Texture mixer, blend two texture sets with a smart mask/paint, blending them based on their height, with high performance (60fps EEVEE):
– Intelligent & elegant workflow :
– Designed to work on whole environments, and allow close enough to real-time interaction in cycles to edit meshes & effects seamlessly :
– Size Adaptability. Match the effect to the size of your objects, from subtle edge-wear on a small device, to a mountain sized castle. Smart masks are designed with “World<–>Object-space” sliders, and distance values are in meters, so you don’t have to guess. Sand can appear a few meters above sea level, edge-wear can be 0.01m on a small prop and 1m on a massive temple. An effect can happen at an exact world altitude, or react more to each object’s position and orientation:
– All node have Height input/output, so any effect can follow your meshe’s displacement, appear more in cracks ect…:
– Noise textures bank, and noisify node, to quickly add various irregular looks, from photo realistic scratches, to organic and stylized dry-brush-strokes :
– Smart fabric shader, just input a single image and get a super complete & customizable fabric, with wrinkles/threads normals, displacement, sss/transluscence, metalic picker to make e.g: weaven gold thread ect…
– Easy 1-click edge-wear, generates bump/displacement, can be quickly controled with vertex colors, and done either over a texture set, or slapped after any material (can also be synched on many)
– Extra shader effects Node simplifies managing things like emission, alpha, SSS, translucence, transmission:
– Synch effect node allows you to synchronize any effect on any number of materials, so tweak it once and see the effect on your entire scene. You can even replace the effect:
– Fully customizable. Go 1 click with the asset browser library, or copy-paste building blocks to make your smart materials from scratch. You can also just reverse-engineer any node, as they’re organized to be as clean and readable as possible. If you Ctrl+H a typical smart-material can look like this, to understand the overall organisation:
– Full or Lite version of the masks, to be lighter for eevee that has to compile shaders, or if you just want the essential :
10- Anti-tile & UV<—>Box mapping, break texture repetitions and alternate any shader between using UVs or Triplanar/box mapping, with a slider to project in world or object space. (If you want to move the object around and have its box mapping follow, or stay fixed on the world for all objects.)
– Leaking mask, the dirty leaks can happen more or less on upward & downward facing areas, in Occlusion, and in world or object location (more at the bottom or top)
(gif of leaking building & props, with disp)
– Smart water shader, focused on artistic control, with foam, roughness & volumetric muddiness, reflection controls :
– Puddle effect, with nice control for spec, roughness, muddiness. Can affect displacement, and driven by painting an image mask or vertex colors ect…:
– Random per object, when you need an extra help to break repetitions. Just drag & drop the node anywhere and adjust the randomisation level (value, hue, sat, and seed to shift things around if you don’t like this value on this object.) You can also just use this node’s output value anywhere, even for VFX, to add variation per object.
– Local mask, a node group you can drag & drop (append) to add a spherical mask, that can be scaled non-uniformly for example to just place an effect where you want in the world :
– Displacement decal, a node group you can drag & drop (append) to add any png image as a decal that actually displaces the mesh, instead of only using paralax. It can be synched on several materials simply by copy pasting it. It’s volumetric, not a 2d plane, so it can project throught many objects too.
– Decal node, shader based, so it perfectly adapts to the displacement of your mesh. (or meshes, as it can be synched accros many materials.)
– Smart brightness/contrast, that respects your black & white point, your mask/texture won’t get washed-out or burned.
– Make-it-Alive, drop this node on any texture to make it animated, like alien mass or lava.
– Paralax mapping node, append (not reuse) on any shader to add some fake (“free” & real-time) displacement, perfect for eevee. Great for cycles too in many cases, to avoid subdivision/VRam shenanigans