Material Preview Thumbnails

[metaar]

Can anyone tell me why the material preview thumbnails get rendered again from scratch every time a panel is opened? Any reason why these aren’t cached and only rendered when there is a change?

For example:
Opening the material panel - all the thumbnails are rendered, even the ones that are not shown on the screen
Changing an object’s material - thumbnails are rendered again
Changing a layer material - thumbnails are rendered again

I have been experiencing this since Rhino 6, but it got infinitely worse in Rhino 8 along with the extreme slowness of the layer panel. Is it only my system or is it a general thing? I use a mix of Rhino and Enscape materials and my renderer is set to Rhino Renderer. In my experience any kind of material operation takes ages to complete.

[ShynnSup]

Yes, we all experience it.

I have created a thread here and also added a wish to not display thumbnails.

Why is Rhino so bad at dealing with materials?

I am talking about UX, UI and performance. Performance: 1.It takes ages to load the materials. I don’t know what happens under the hood but of all the 3d programs I use Rhino is the only one struggling to load the materials. It gets specially unworkable with long lists of materials. 2.Scrolling the list is practically impossible. 3.Deleting materials also takes AGES and I just experienced multiple crashes after waiting 20 minutes for Rhino to DELETE ALL materials in the file. 4.Even with on…

WISH: Display Materials as List Names (no thumbnail)

Hi Andrew, initial motive is performance yes, but even if there was no performance issues, having a list of only text names is sometimes easier to navigate when working with many materials.