Materials Editor in Rhino Mac WIP. (5C95w) Suggestions

Rhino Rhino for Mac
,
1

I’m taking a deep dive into the Features of the MaterialEditor on Mac WIP. This thread will record this.
As I’m a long-time user these are suggestions to the developers to improve the experience for everyone. I’ve used Rhino Render, Maxwell, and now Octane Render for years on Windows Rhino.

But I’d LOVE to use Mac exclusively. Even waiting years for plugins to develop! The following are impediments in the user experience.

  1. Materials Editor window is very slow to load compared to other panels. Can it be faster? (It’s not a normal ‘panel,’ is it.?)
  2. Why does Materials Editor need it’s own Render Preview environment when it can be next to the Main viewport set to “Rendered Viewport”, can that be turned off for better performance?
  3. Users must click ONCE to target the Mat Ed window as active, and AGAIN to select something. Then you must repeat this when going back to the Main Viewport ONCE to target, AGAIN to select. These extra double-clicks which are abnormal for the standard flow seriously slow you down.
  4. If you have a selection in the Main Viewport, and you double click a Material in the Editor, either in the Library, or Model Mats, what should happen? It should APPLY the material. Currently, this action is wasted, (not used.) Dragging the Material to apply is great and intuitive, but slower than Selecting in Main, and double clicking in Mat Ed.

It seems to me these are all related to the type of Window the Mat Editor is in (according to osx) , that cannot be treated just like another Panel like Layers / Name Cplanes…etc. am I wrong?

1 Like
2

Hi Sef,

Thanks for the feedback. @marlin or @dan can best comment of the technical details and potential for the mat editor.

Since you’ve used the material editor in Rhino 5 for Windows with RR and Octane, do you like the workflow with that one?

3

Editing materials on the Mac is going to be replaced in Mac V6 with a new cross platform material editor being written for V6, so the current Mac material editor is not going to get further attention. To answer a few of your points, the material editor generates all the material thumbnails when it starts, so it takes a few seconds to do that.

As far as point 3, you are discussing something called “click through” - MSWindows implements this and OS X does not. Try your same experiment with two Finder windows and you will see that it takes two clicks to select an item in a background Finder window. One click to activate the window, and a second click to perform the selection.

1 Like
4

@marlin
I had a quick question…
Is there a way to make folders in the Material Editor?
Also, when selecting environment HDR file, or like a bump file the default saving directory of
the rendered file becomes that directory. Is there any setting to change this?

5

I see. Makes sense.