I know material maker is very things like precoderal materials. It it is a open source alternative to a program by adobe. How can I learn to use this type of software? What terminology do I look for?

    newmodels What terminology do I look for?

    PBR and BRDF.

    Note that there is not the physically based shading, it is rather a container term for methods that use sort of reflectance function to approximate realistic scenes (the term is also used for path traced photorealistic rendering, but that's different). This function, a BRDF (bidirectional reflectance distribution function) describes how light is reflected from a surface. The necessary ingredients, textures for the different channels, can be made manually or via tools like the material maker (which is cool).

    Quite a few tutorials and texts with more depth can be found out there, also how to implement it.

      This is the best book on the topic, not sure why it's so expensive now.

      The PBR Guide: A Handbook for Physically Based Rendering