Gator Material Studio v1.2.0

Gator Material Studio v1.2.0

This update focuses heavily on the Designer workspace, improving procedural noise quality, GPU compatibility, preview performance, and cleaning up the node library without breaking existing projects.

Designer Noise Improvements

The procedural noise system received a major pass.

• Reworked the regular noise families so different noise nodes now produce genuinely distinct results instead of behaving like renamed versions of the same generator.
• Improved the default behavior of noise families including:
• Clouds
• Dirt
• Grunge
• Cells
• Moisture Noise
• Crystal
• Gaussian Noise
• Fibers
• Directional Scratches
• Additional procedural noise variants

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Fixed noise becoming visibly blocky or pixelated when Scale was increased.

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Fixed rectangular/grid artifacts that could appear inside generated noise.

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Fixed UV wrapping seams in procedural noise.

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Fixed seams affecting Advanced Noise generation.

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Improved Blur HQ behavior and output quality.

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Base generators such as Dirt remain separate from presets such as Dirt 1, Dirt 2, Dirt 3, etc. These nodes use different generation methods and intentionally produce different results.

Advanced Noise Fixes

Advanced Noise received a separate quality and stability pass.

• Fixed Advanced Noise profiles displaying as completely white previews.
• Fixed invalid generated shader code affecting the entire Advanced Noise family.
• Fixed the shader matrix construction used by Advanced Noise.
• Fixed block-shaped artifacts in the Spots profile.
• Reworked Spots to produce smoother, more organic distributions.
• Reworked the Dirt profile to remove square cell artifacts and generate more natural clumps and flecks.
• Improved Advanced Dirt generation so it better resembles a usable dirt/noise source.
• Reworked Blue Noise generation to remove its visible square lattice.
• Removed remaining triangular/simplex lattice edges from Blue Noise.
• Added additional domain distortion and rotated sampling to reduce recognizable procedural structure.
• Separated Blue Noise and White Noise Fast generation so the two profiles retain distinct behavior.

RTX 50-Series / Blackwell Preview Fixes

Designer 3D preview rendering was reworked to address severe shader stalls observed on newer NVIDIA Blackwell / RTX 50-series hardware.

• Normal Designer material previews no longer generate and compile a new spatial shader for every graph update.
• Designer now evaluates the material channels as textures and supplies them to a stable StandardMaterial3D.
• Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, Height, AO, Emission, and other applicable channels use the new texture-backed preview path.
• Advanced cases that genuinely require generated spatial shaders continue to use the dynamic shader path.
• Restored the Compiling 3D preview... state for those advanced shader cases.
• Interactive Designer preview textures are limited to an appropriate working resolution to avoid unnecessary compilation and GPU overhead.
• Added clearer handling between texture-backed and dynamic-spatial preview modes.

This significantly reduces the multi-second shader stalls that could occur while editing Designer graphs.

Designer Node Library Cleanup

The Designer library had accumulated a large number of nodes that were functionally identical aliases of other nodes.

Approximately 200 true duplicate nodes are now hidden from:

• Add Node
• Node Search
• Library listings
• Generated node categories

These nodes have not been deleted.

Their original IDs remain registered internally so projects created with previous versions continue to load correctly.

Examples include redundant value/input aliases where the node behavior, ports, parameters, defaults, and generated result were identical.

Uniform Value is now the primary value node used by the interface and onboarding workflow instead of exposing multiple identical alternatives.

The redundant Color node is similarly hidden in favor of Uniform Color while remaining available internally for project compatibility.

Advanced presets also remain available where they provide genuinely different output.

A few overlapping names were clarified so both the base implementation and Advanced Noise implementation can remain accessible without ambiguity.

The Designer library now contains roughly 509 visible nodes, with redundant entries removed while retaining the nodes that provide distinct functionality.

Compatibility

• Existing Designer graphs using hidden duplicate nodes remain compatible.
• Existing node IDs have not been removed.
• Hidden aliases can still be resolved when loading older projects.
• The cleanup only affects what users are presented with when creating new nodes.
• Existing procedural graphs do not need to be rebuilt.

v1.2.0 Summary

This update primarily improves:

• Procedural noise quality
• Noise scaling
• Advanced Noise reliability
• Blue Noise quality
• Designer 3D preview performance
• RTX 50-series / Blackwell compatibility
• Node library clarity
• Backward compatibility with existing Designer projects

The result is a smaller, clearer Designer node library with better procedural output and a substantially more efficient material preview path.