About Shader Cloud

There are a lot of good resources for Blender textures, materials and models.

But material websites tend to provide you with a .blend file which includes a bunch of junk you don't need, such as meshes and viewport changes etc... You then have to extract the part you want to use.

At Shader Cloud we're trying a different approach, which is to store the shader node settings in our database.

To share a material you don't actually need to share a whole .blend file, you only need to know which nodes were used and what settings were entered.

This approach has a number of benefits:

• You can easily export a single material from a complex blend file; only the shader node settings are sent and stored at Shader Cloud.
• Importing a material into a file just creates a new material and applies the shader node settings to that material. This means it will not affect anything else if your blend file and can easily be removed by deleting the material.
• It allows us to generate uniform and comparable renders of all uploaded materials.
• Allows for materials to be created and edited directly on our website using our node editor system.

FAQ