great idea, and I think that's where macros come in. I am working on a mod to your mockup that flows left to right, starting with geometry and ending with a (moral equivalent of composite output) feed to all users of that nodetree; I think that would blend our metaphors.
A texture stack can always be represented as a nodetree. Even a macro to convert from stack to nodetree would be nice To re-use a texture/texture stack with another material, user would just click the tex-swatch for the appropriate texswatch, choose/select that texture nodetree from the header list and that texswatch would be added onto the texOuput node. I will provide a mockup of the workflow this week. Regarding "I just want to add a UV Image" - that could run a macro that makes a UV geometry -> image input -> material diffuse output texture nodetree, and sets the material shadeless, changes the Scale of the object to match the Image resolution, sets alpha 0 and uses the image's alpha, does the Texmode thang so that we see it in 3D view, etc. This is a long-standing confuser for users. The only step left is to actually select the image...so we just need some way (i know, not a popup) to tell the user the remaining steps. Other macros based on mat/tex questions I answer regularly: I want to add a decal <- Object map to I want to rough up the surface <- Nor map to I want it to look like glass <- Material library integration? Some of these presets/macros have options, like for the glass do you want to use ztrans or raytrans; for that image example above I can see options to scale or not the object itself to match resolution. --Roger ________________________________ From: Doug Ollivier <[email protected]> To: bf-blender developers <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, May 12, 2010 7:25:41 AM Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Texture assignment workflow is confusing Don't worry I understood it. it's a mock-up after-all which means a certain amount of imagination is always required. Nice work on the mock-up, and totally agree with that being the end goal that a new system would enable. I think there needs to be another more simple interface closer to the non-nodes interface for people who "just want to plug an image in" and that is what i am interested in exploring since i think that is the more unique challenge. Nodes are quite well understood but are a big learning curve, great for complex tasks like colour correction between sockets as you have shown, but completely over complex for simple tasks that involve 1 connection. Cheers, Doug _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
