As discussed here, the built in Create Material component in R6 has a flaw that hasn’t been fixed since it was reported two years ago:
And none of the plugins I looked at offered as much control over materials as the C# code from David that is the basis for my mMaterial cluster in that thread. It can be easily extended or, as I did in today’s example, unused inputs can be removed from the cluster to make it smaller.
As for ‘Bake To Layer’, I cobbled together a simpler version of that almost two years ago when I trialed R6. That version depended on the materials being manually created and assigned to each layer in Rhino but still, the ability to instantly delete and re-bake dozens of layers of related geometry was a revelation. Muy bueno! Now I want more, and I’ve got it.
My aversion to plugins, except when absolutely necessary (like Anemone), stems from decades spent learning and adapting to an endless series of “frameworks” for web application programming in Javascript, Java, JSP, PHP and even CSS. Each one considered themselves to be the ultimate layer of abstraction. Very few were really that unique, like jQuery and Angular JS, which were ground breaking concepts. Grasshopper is fun but “big projects” (a relative term) generally require more than what it currently offers. Additional expense, commitment to someone else’s coding ideas and C#/Python can each be deal breakers.