[Concept] Materials++

thomthom

@alz said:

Groups are good. Would there be a way to preset groups?

I was thinking of attaching the Group data with the material. So when copying between models or loading components it'd follow.

@alz said:

Or perhaps an option to display a tree-view of the Material directory. I hate getting confused where I'm at in the current browser. There's no need for Favorites, just show me a directory tree

Initial idea was just a list of material in the model. There is no way to load .skm files into SU via ruby.

@alz said:

When viewing materials in the model, perhaps a usage-counter when listing details? How many faces or objects are using that material (with a right-click "select all users")

There is no efficient way of getting this data from the model. Would have to iterate the whole model - not something you want to happen often.
But could be part of a report. I was thinking of a report that would list what definitions where a material has been used.

@alz said:

A UV key-nudge for transforms (position, rotation, scale). A reset transforms (position, rotation, scale, all).
Can you elaborate on this?n Not sure if I fully understand.

@alz said:

A simple name search field. Have a big list (even nested)? Just type "brick" and it'll then only list all "brick" materials.

Yea - this is something I think would be useful.

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

you think it will work on macs?

Good question. I hope it will. But you never know when making stuff with webdialogs. Heck - might even find it failing on PC.

sigh

Would not be the first projects of mine to fall apart due to flawed API.

alz

@thomthom said:

@alz said:

A UV key-nudge for transforms (position, rotation, scale). A reset transforms (position, rotation, scale, all).
Can you elaborate on this?n Not sure if I fully understand.

I just realized this branches over to UV editing and not the core idea behind your Material browser, so it might not make sense. But in the vibe of paint control, it'd provide a way to push and pull UVs via the keyboard. I think there's already some plugins out there that do this, so it's probably not the best suggestion for your time

thomthom

I'll put it in the "Look at later" pile. But I think I'll skip it for the initial release.

chrisjk

Thom,
A button to rotate a texture and duplicate it in the process through 90 degrees would be useful. It's easy enough to do on a single planar face using texture>position but for simply dropping a texture on a curved surface, I'd like to have the two orientations readily available.

alz

Ah -- here's one I found myself wanting this morning --

A browser option to swap or condense materials. Select a bunch of materials in your list and swap them all for a different material.

thomthom

Ah yes, merge. Good one.

Pixero

WOW!
Me wants....

bagatelo

My wish list:
-Procedural materials
-Something like Adobe Kuler

thomthom

@bagatelo said:

-Procedural materials

Far beyond the scope of this plugin and my own capabilities I'm afraid. Procedural textures is far from a light task

@bagatelo said:

-Something like Adobe Kuler

What is that? A tool that generate colour schemes? I've never used Adobe Kuler.

Dan Rathbun

@remus said:

A colour picker a la the native one would be very helpful.

I've long wanted a color picker for use with SU Ruby.

Had planned to see if Chameleon could be setup as a WebDialog to give us a quick and dirty picker. It's a free (BSD license,) totally Js based popup picker.
http://karmatics.com/chameleon/

I can get the native color picker to popup thru Sketchup.send_action but can't figure out how to get the return color value. (There is an object for Win32 that can be embedded in webpages for the crappy Win3.0 style picker on MSIE, but noone wants that one, and it's not cross-platform.)

So me thinks Chameleon might be a fasttrack solution. I wanted to make it a standalone WebDialog that could be called from ANY ruby, or from ANY WebDialog (via a callback to ruby.)

RickW

@alz said:

Ah -- here's one I found myself wanting this morning --

A browser option to swap or condense materials. Select a bunch of materials in your list and swap them all for a different material.

You mean something like Repaint? I'm working on a GUI for this, with one-for-many replacement, and drag-and-drop selections. Early testing was going well, but my day job slowed development...

pieterv

Cool, sounds very interesting and promising!!! I have two suggestions, but I guess they are probably not possible. Anyway:

A BIGGER color wheel then the standard one, which is realy not handy.
The ability to use "Ctrl-Z" in the materials section!

EscapeArtist

Ability to add a directory of textures to the library?

thomthom

@pieterv said:

Cool, sounds very interesting and promising!!! I have two suggestions, but I guess they are probably not possible. Anyway:

A BIGGER color wheel then the standard one, which is realy not handy.

The ability to use "Ctrl-Z" in the materials section!

Ugh, the colour wheel - I really can't stand that thing. I don't see how people manage to use it? Oh well, I can add it to the list - but it won't be priority. In fact, the material editing is lower on the list - first comes the browser part of it.

Btw, what do you mean by Ctrl+Z in the material section? You want Ctrl+Z to undo changes in the model?

thomthom

@escapeartist said:

Ability to add a directory of textures to the library?

I like this idea.

pieterv

Yes, that's what I mean. When I apply a material for example, I can not use Ctrl+Z to undo it. When I move one of the sliders to change a colors saturation for example, I can also not undo the change I have made.

thomthom

YEa - Keystrokes aren't sent to SU while the focus is at one of the toolbar windows. Something that has annoyed me since I started using SU. Mostly when you undo changes to a model and when you undo a material change the focus automatically shifts to the toolbar window and you have to click on the SU window to make the shortcuts work again.

EarthMover

A paintbrush tool to apply materials while dragging across multiple faces. It would be a big help when applying projected textures with hidden geometry turned on for things like rounded corners and SDS meshes. With SU's poor UV capabilities most of us end up projecting multiple facing textures to organic geometry to fake it. The one click per face or drag select methods are a real pain with a lot of small triangles.

pieterv

@earthmover said:

A paintbrush tool to apply materials while dragging across multiple faces. It would be a big help when applying projected textures with hidden geometry turned on for things like rounded corners and SDS meshes. With SU's poor UV capabilities most of us end up projecting multiple facing textures to organic geometry to fake it. The one click per face or drag select methods are a real pain with a lot of small triangles.

I definitly second that.

@Thom:

Aha, so that's the reason! Interesting.