Tunable organic surfaces for building science fiction worlds

Principled Organic Materials is a collection of 7 procedural materials for creating highly customizable, organic, bio-inspired materials in blender through easy-to-use nodes.

Inspired by both biology and fiction, these materials are perfect for science fiction, horror, and speculative biology surfaces: from alien egg sacs, to decaying flesh, and infected wounds. This product began as a set of internal tools developed by our scientific animation studio for representing microscopic biological systems. We wanted to transform these tools into something that could be used by the broader creative Blender community.

Every material is controlled through an easy-to-use node with a suite of options for independently controlling the color design and surface morphology. If you can use the principled BSDF shader, you can use these nodes.

Core Features

• 7 fully procedural materials.

• Easy-to-use nodes with a range of customization options.

• Shader-based displacement (Cycles only prior to Blender 4.2) for creating tangible, believable materials.

Requirements

• Blender version: 3.3, 3.6, 4.0, 4.1. Please download the correct version for your system. The shader nodes in Blender that this product depends on have been changed over time. Files designated for newer versions are not be compatible with older versions of Blender. If you are using an intermediate version of Blender (e.g. 3.4) that this product has not been tested with, your best bet is to use the file designated for the older version of Blender.

• GPU (GeForce RTX 2060 or better) strongly recommended for performance. Because these materials depend on large node-networks under the hood with many noise generators, CPUs tend to render slowly.

• Cycles or Eevee, but Cycles is required for shader based displacement and to enjoy the full-realism of these materials.

EEVEE Next Update

As of Blender 4.2, EEVEE now supports real displacement with shaders. Just enable "Displacement and bump" in the shader options, and you can enjoy real geometric displacement with EEVEE. However, these shaders still tend to provide superior performance in Cycles. Complex shaders tend to be slow to compile in EEVEE.

Before you buy

Please note as indicated above, that it is strongly recommended that you use a system with a GPU for these materials. The shader networks tend to run slowly on CPUs (unless you have many cores), so you may experience significant render slow-downs with CPU-only rendering. If you are unsure if these materials will work for your system, please consider trying out the free-tier, which includes the "alien eggs" shader with all features included. If you are running on an older CPU-only system, this product may not be for you. 

These shaders look best with actual displacement enabled (not just fake "bump"). Actual displacement is only available in Cycles, not Eevee for Blender versions prior to 4.2. Note that as of Blender 4.2, EEVEE now supports actual displacment. Also, please note that actual displacement can only be as detailed as the underlying geometry will allow. Hence, to achieve the fully detailed effects shown here, meshes with higher subdivision are typically required. We recommend using highly subdivided meshes and real displacement for "hero assets" that are close to the camera, while using lower resolution meshes (and potentially just bump mapping) for background props far from the camera to manage resources.

Potential Applications

Principled Organic Materials is intended to be customizable for a variety of applications, especially in the areas of science fiction, speculative biology, horror, and creature design. Some possible use cases you might find for these materials include:

• Alien eggs and clustered organic surfaces

• Alien and biological growth and infestations

• Surfaces inspired by biological cells, including fat cells, skin cells, and epithelial surfaces

• Wounds, blood, guts, and infected, decaying, or damaged flesh or skin

• Reptile, creature, and alien skins

• and much more!

What's included

Pro Pack
This product is distributed as a .blend file (with separate .blend files for different versions where necessary). The product contains:

• 7 procedural materials, each of which is applied to a preview sphere for rendering and visualization: "Alien eggs," "Scaley Alien Skin," "Lumpy Flesh," "Alien Sponge," "Lumpy Wound," "Decaying Flesh," and "Fat Cells."

• Each material is controlled through an easy-to-use node group that can be customized in a similar way that you would use the principled BSDF. Just drag the sliders or type in values to explore different looks.

• "Zombie Suzanne" render setup example .blend file, illustrating how multiple different procedural materials can be combined using texture-painted masks to create even more diverse looks (Blender 4.0 and Blender 4.1 only).

Free version

This free version is distributed as a .blend file containing the "alien egg" shader from the Pro Pack. This specific material is identical to the version in the Pro Pack and is great for testing out whether these materials work well for you.

Get Started Creating

Check out the "Documentation" tab for more information on using this product!

Change log

2024/08/30 Updates:

• Updated for support for Blender 4.2. For Cycles, no changes to shaders have been required. However, for EEVEE, the Decaying Flesh and Scaley Alien Skin material have been updated for compatibility with the displacement in EEVEE. Specifically, in EEVEE, the Scaley Alien Skin material does not support the very fine cracks, and the Decaying Flesh small pores now are color only, not displacement. The changes to the way that EEVEE does displacement have necessitated these changes. However, EVEEE now supports real displacement, improving the look of all shaders in EEVEE overall.