MaterialX is an open standard for representing rich material and look-development content in computer graphics, enabling its platform-independent description and exchange across applications and renderers. Launched at Industrial Light & Magic in 2012, MaterialX has been a key technology in their feature films and real-time experiences since Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. The project was released as open source in 2017, with companies including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Pixar, Autodesk, Adobe, and SideFX contributing to its ongoing development. In 2021, MaterialX became the seventh hosted project of the Academy Software Foundation.
MATERIALX_BUILD_PYTHON
option to build Python bindings.MATERIALX_BUILD_VIEWER
option to build the MaterialX viewer.The MaterialX codebase requires a compiler with support for C++17, and can be built with any of the following:
The Python bindings for MaterialX are based on PyBind11, and support Python versions 3.6 and greater.
The MaterialX Viewer leverages shader generation to build GLSL shaders from MaterialX graphs, rendering the results using the NanoGUI framework.
Figure 1: Procedural and uniform materials in the MaterialX viewer
Figure 2: Textured, color-space-managed materials in the MaterialX viewer
The Open Chess Set is an open reference asset, consisting of a MaterialX file in the Standard Surface shading model and a geometry file in the glTF format. It was authored by Moeen Sayed and Mujtaba Sayed, and was contributed to the MaterialX project by Side Effects.
Figure 3: The Open Chess Set, rendered in Arnold for Maya
Figure 4: The Open Chess Set, rendered in Karma XPU for Houdini
The following packages contain pre-built binaries for the latest release, including the MaterialX viewer, Python libraries, and example assets: