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Ultra-Mat: A New Material Workflow Inside EEVEE + Cycles
🕑 Added 2026-01-04 05:35:07 +0000 UTC
Hey everyone — happy New Year! 🎉
I’ve been pretty busy over the holidays working on a few different things, but one project I’m especially excited about is a new material system I’ve been building called Ultra-Mat.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you might remember “One Material to Rule Them All” from about six years ago. Ultra-Mat is loosely a follow-up to that idea, but it’s also very different. This time around, the focus is on working with existing free PBR textures — whether that’s just a single diffuse image, or a full set with diffuse, normal, roughness, and displacement maps.
I basically poured everything I’ve learned since then into this material: better triplanar mapping, more believable scratches, edge wear, and dirt in both EEVEE and Cycles, and ways to break up obvious texture tiling. All of that is wrapped into one material, plus a small add-on that makes it easy to build materials quickly — and yes, you can save them straight to KIT OPS as reusable materials.
One important thing to note: this add-on requires Blender 5.0 or newer, because the material relies on new functionality that simply didn’t exist before. And honestly, this is where things get really interesting.
Blender 5.0 introduced menu-style switches inside material shaders. That might sound small, but it’s a big deal. It lets you bypass entire parts of a shader so they don’t even compile unless you turn them on. In practical terms, that means Ultra-Mat can be very complex under the hood, but only use the parts you actually need.
So you can turn scratches on or off. Dirt on or off. Switch between using one texture or four. Enable or disable anti-tiling, triplanar features, and more — all without paying a performance cost for features you’re not using. It’s honestly pretty wild, and a lot of fun to work with.
You can learn more about the addon at: https://cw1.me/ultra-mat
it's Beta software, and you just drag-drop the add-on onto Blender 5.0, and it will install.
I’m really excited to hear what you all think.
