Can the materials in Brazil be overhauled for V3? One point specifically would be to upgrade the ability to place multiple texture maps/procedurals in a slot ‘easily’. Right now it is possible but it is one of the most kludgy interfaces in 3D.
I need to be able to place (into a tray and not just a single slot) multiple textures and be able to have a ‘live’ slider to fade in and out, amounts easily. And preferably with photoshop layer attributes like additive, multiply, etc, etc. And be able to turn them on or off with a click of a button and not have to fool with a whole stack. This is not rocket science…many apps have had this for years. For example, Electric Image, had it 12-13 years ago. Brazil is a great rendering engine and the materials are very powerful but getting to that power is very, very difficult and time consuming.
With neon available now it allows for much experimentation and it would be nice to have some of this with sliders for real-time creative manipulation.
These kids of changes are all Rhino issues and not Brazil - so if we do something like this (and I agree this is an area ripe for improvement) it would be in Rhino 6.
What is the difference between a “tray” and a “slot” ?
All visable at the same time and if implemented, can be cross-faded. Actually like a ‘Composite Environment’ but for texture maps or procedurals and real-time faders.
or just go full nodal. There are many times when i want to simply “disconnect” things while experimenting, and being able to unplug nodes and have them remaining for later use or reconnection would be very handy (as with Grasshopper)…
I like nodal editors too Jonah. @andy what do you think about just using GH for a Material and Env. UI? It would also be quite cool to save GH definitions as render set ups.
I’m fine with it as long as we remove the word “just” from your sentence. I can’t imagine that requiring users to work with a node based editor is going to work for casual rendering people.
Also, I think the idea that we would require all rendering engines to use a node based interface seems a bit daft.
GH as an optional UI for BZ would be excellent in my opinion and I agree it doesn’t have to supersede the existing one. I meant ‘just’ as in ‘don’t change what’s there, but maybe ‘just’ add a GH plugin for node control’. The GH interface is so smooth to work in that for me I think it would speed things up and make texture associations in materials much easier to visualize. For casual rendering users I suggest RR/Neon or nXt, the latter having the simplest UI albeit not as well integrated into Rhino 5 yet.
I’d much rather see the existing one upgraded in features and also usability. Nodes would be fine ‘if’ speed and simplicity were present. The last thing Rhino needs is a complicated procedure to set up high quality simple materials. Make nodes as an add-on (or alternate mode for some added power) and upgrade what is already there.