Messing around with materials and textures using Rhino GUI Panels can be extremely tedious and frustrating at times.
Please take a look at these few problems and consider some changes. They might seem small to you, but they pile up, and I will not list every one of them, certainly not at once.
In tree view when miniatures are quite big and they are offset to resemble the hierarchy, names are cut. Please adjust the UI so names will always be visible. In a situation like this names should move from the right side to the bottom of the miniature.
The same goes for the List View, once names do not fit, please move them underneath miniatures and display the List View as a Grid View that has only one column.
a. While choosing existing textures, miniatures in the tree view always slowly regenerate themselves.
b. Clicking on the texture in the tree view does not highlight the selection (however, the selection name appears in a different place)
Unfortunately, textures are square and this leaves very little space for the title in the Grid View. I know that there are also List View and Tree View, but maybe as an advanced option, there should be an option to display 2 lines of the texture name.
Consider adding an expandable sidebar with a possibly huge texture preview while Edit Floating.
For me, Edit Floating means that I really need to focus on some texture and I want ultimate comfort. It should also provide a tiling scrollbar to preview the texture while tiling or zooming even further to display tiny details.
Keep in mind that Grid, List, and Tree views are meant for navigation not for zooming in to preview details of one texture - this is only, a secondary purpose. Zooming in “destroys” our navigation panel which is not nice, we need to scroll, zoom in, zoom out, scroll, zoom in, zoom out…
Also having an option to preview the material ball in big window would be handy, ideally with navigation capabilities as in regular Rhino viewport - zooming, panning.
If I switch window from Rhino to another program and return, then Texture Browser (which is a modal window) falls behind floating Textures Panel and doesn’t move forward when selected.
If you want bigger previews in the floating editor, then there is a splitter between the “Name and Type” section and the preview. One can adjust it to get a bigger preview. Also if the preview is a material, then one can rotate the preview by right click and drag. Zooming is not yet supported.
Haha, thanks! There’s an invisible bar that I can drag I think I’m a little justified here for not knowing about its existence.
Still, I think it would be nice to have a big preview to the side because material properties are in the vertical column underneath, so having a big preview limits the space and we use screens that are horizontal, so it’s a better use of space. Also, the scrollbar to quickly zoom in, zoom out, and show tiling still stands. But thanks to your tip my life is a little easier already.
Actually, Edit Floating is non modal window, so I can still tweak values in the main Textures Panel, but it’s not as elegant solution.
PS.
It seems that there is an arbitrary max size of the texture preview that is restored after closing and opening the Edit Floating window, I don’t think it’s necessary, if I left it huge, I want it huge again.
I kind of do not like the splitter in the Windows as it is invisible. There has been a lot of discussion that there should be some kind of hint that there is a splitter. I like the splitter on the Mac.
I added a new YT. I think the floating editor should have the same possibility as the main content editor. To choose between horizontal and vertical layout.
RH-85433 Floating editor should have the possibility to choose horizontal or vertical layout
And I logged a bug about the limited size of the floating content preview.
Update Preview Now missing in the hamburger menu in the Materials Panel. In Textures Panel it exists, also present in the right-click menu both for the Materials and Textures.
BTW I think Update Preview should be exposed in some easy to reach place (maybe next to the “instanced” icon), while fiddling with materials it’s very uncomfortable to reach into this menu. When Auto-Update Preview is disabled then on each material thumbnail could be an indicator/button informing if given material is representing current settgins (in other words if the thumbnail is expired or not). Clicking this indicator/button should force update on that material or texture.
This video shows how turning on and off the Materials or Textures Panel just once in an empty file drastically affects the speed of saving material using the Content Cache. Here we see around 4x slowdown.
There are problems in Rhino 8 and Rhino 9 WIP with synchronization between what is displayed in the Rendered Viewport, Materials and Textures Tab and Edit Floating window. I’m using some rendering plugin but I doubt that has something to do with differences between thumbnail in Edit Floating and Textures tab. Behavior of these previews are very stubborn and they don’t want to update.
Even more interesting is that once while I was resizing the thumbnail inside Edit Floating window, for different sizes I had different expired previews with old colors. So in total around 5 differend chached? previews were presented.
Different colors of the same texture in different tabs and viewport
About case 9: Can you repeat the problem if you only use Rhino Render (disable Bella) and you do not use Grasshopper? I have no knowledge about Grasshopper so I am thinking if either Bella or Grasshopper could cause the problem? If you can reproduce this with just Rhino Render and using the material tab and texture tab, then it would be great to get hold of the model. Btw. One can clear the cache by running the TestClearRDKCaches.
Maybe it’s a Content Cache thing, but to be precise about my observations:
Not baking the material and using only Custom Preview reports times of 5 ms (however accurate that measurement is for this activity).
Adding the Content Cache caches the material to the Rhino material collection and I understand if that takes a bit more time. It shows about 15 extra milliseconds needed for that.
Only entering the Materials and Textures panels (despite closing them right after) causes the Content Cache time to balloon up to 50 - 100 ms which seriously hurts interactivity.
I just wanted this to be very clear about that.
Tried only a little, but I haven’t noticed such things with Rhino Render yet. I use Bella and would like to continue using it. Bella can present its specific materials as OpenGL materials in Rendered mode, this is very helpful for texturing and general scene work. I thought it might be some general Rhino problem especially due to the differences between the material preview in the Textures Panel and Edit Floating.
However, there are problems with keeping the materials, textures thumbnails in various panels and viewport appearance in sync.
I think I’m a little justified here for not knowing about its existence.
