Hi Laurence -- While improvements to the process are conceivable, and it would be wonderful to make design decisions now that will allow for them, please don't lose sight of the nearer-term goal of usability!
Dynamic/conditional tools sound interesting. There are also some things about the exclusive nature of Soft's render partitions that are sometimes inconvenient, but it's hard to see how allowing non-exclusive partitioning (in which an object could simultaneously live in multiple partitions, say, one for a visibility override and one for a material override) would stay clearly manageable. If you could solve that one, it would be perhaps a time-saver. Some way of nesting or linking partition membership perhaps? Venn diagrams? But I'll bet these very questions were raised by the XSI dev team -- asking former Soft devs about it might be a good place to start. Do keep us posted on your endeavors in this direction! Ed
