Stop building materials
by hand.
Node Ninja reads your texture folders and automatically builds complete, production-ready Unreal materials — every map connected, every projection option ready. Free from School of Motion.
Free download · No credit card · Windows only
Setting up an Unreal material by hand is a grind.
Every PBR texture set comes with 4–8 maps. Each one needs to be imported, assigned to the right parameter, wired into the Material Graph. Roughness and normals need their sampler type set to Linear Color or Normal, or they’ll render wrong. And if you picked the wrong projection setup, you’re redoing it from scratch.
Now multiply that by a folder full of assets.
Point it at a folder. Get a finished material.
Node Ninja scans your texture folder, identifies every map by name, builds a complete Material Instance with the right sampler types, projection mode, and displacement settings — all before you’ve had a chance to do it wrong yourself. Unreal still has to compile the shaders, but you won’t be the one wiring nodes.
Albedo, roughness, metalness, normal, displacement, AO, emission, opacity — recognized automatically from your filenames. Works with textures from Quixel Bridge too.
Built into every projection mode. Hex Tile overlays a hexagonal offset pattern on your texture to break up visible tiling on large surfaces. Essential for ground, rock, concrete, anything that repeats. No extra nodes, no manual blending.
Choose standard UV projection or world-space Triplanar at build time. No UV setup required for Triplanar. Node Ninja wires whichever you pick automatically.
Build a Material Instance parented to a SOM master — ideal for most workflows — or generate a standalone Master Material with nodes wired directly.
Node Ninja can build materials with true Nanite tessellation driven by your height map. The included Nanite Ninja tool enables Nanite on any mesh and writes the required engine CVars automatically.
Point Node Ninja at a single texture folder or a parent folder full of them. It builds one material per subfolder — import a whole library in less time than it takes to set up a single material by hand.
Select Texture2D assets you’ve already imported — from Quixel Bridge or anywhere else — and run Node Ninja directly. No folder picker required.
Every material is organized the same way. Easy to read, easy to hand off, easy to update with Node Surgeon later.
From folder to finished material — without the busywork.
Watch Node Ninja scan a texture folder, pick projection mode, and build a complete Material Instance — automatically.
Already have materials? Node Surgeon upgrades them.
Node Surgeon is included free with Node Ninja. If you have existing SOM Material Instances and want to change how they work — switch from UV to Triplanar, add displacement, or add hex tiling — Node Surgeon does it without losing your texture assignments.
Select the materials in the Content Browser, run Node Surgeon, choose your new settings, and it re-parents everything automatically. All texture parameters carry over.
Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.
Download Node Ninja
free.
Drop in your email and we’ll send it right over. No spam, no upsell — just the plugin.
Free for personal and commercial use. For Unreal Engine 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7.
We’ve tested it extensively and use it on our own projects, but we still recommend validating in your specific pipeline before shipping.
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