We are not “reinventing the wheel”. There isnt a wheel…and anyway, the wheel metaphor breaks down pretty quickly here.
Easy to use PBR with access to all of the power available to those that need it. That’s what I’m after.
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Exactly.
And just for clarification here - this is what I see from here:
For every user with the rendering chops of Jorgen and Gijs, there are a hundred like RIL. And they still want to be able to use the rendering tools.
I totally agree, simple yet powerful.
A difficult task, but achievable.
Keep in mind that giving Rolf power is my goal.
I have used many render tools, but believe in cycles and opengl so I try to push Rhino vanilla stuff to be as good as possible 
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I want to keep reminding everyone in these deep nerd topic that most users do not use any settings tab. Not a Holo tab. Not a Ril tab.
They just ASSIGN materials from a professionally curated and provided library.
I vote for a great library and all library management tools so people can drive to where they want to go, way before spending much time thinking about what goes under the hood.
G
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Are these things mutually exclusive?
Absolutely not. I think you (and a few nerds) need the tools and controls to make materials and a library (and multiple custom/niche/own libraries). Yet the majority of users need first and foremost great materials and scenes.
Prioritization of work to optimize UI seems way less impactful that prioritizing providing curated solutions to 1000x customers.
Well…ok. Basically I agree with this. Which is why Rhino 6 came with a huge new library.
We may…I’m not sure yet…it will depend on time…convert the entire library to PBR. We will see…it will improve the look of the materials somewhat.
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But there is something else…PBR will give us access to a large number of new downloadable materials which will work “out of the box”
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This is an elaborate mockup design of the RIL Tab I am talking about. 
:
(Holo has other more elaborate ideas about material settings so he can have his own Tab)
// Rolf
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ROFL ROLF 
That made my day!
And I absolutely agree with Gusto that a big, easy and fast to navigate library with lots of great render ready materials for designers with Pantone colors and all important other industry standards should be on top of the list.
Make rendering professional, fun and easy.
With prerendered thumbnails so we can visually fast scroll through the cataloge.
And then my wish comes into play, a good gui for tweaking and building pbrm from scratch.
Presets are king.
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Jorgen
Are you prepared to pay the remarkable licensing fees for Pantone? 
Andy
I challenge you to explain what is going on in the Substance one 
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And Vray…they look like they have come up with a fairly similar approach to us.
I’m not saying the substance is the best (I like V-Ray’s though) but I just brought up two quick examples from the many that are available to illustrate the fact that practically all render programs and engines have had pbr for years. So there is no need to start from scratch. Thinking out such an interface is far from easy, but the way it is done now in the current wip makes things confusing in your attempt to make things simple imo.
If I’m adding ‘effects’, I get double entries, so why not just add only the additional parts:
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Andy we’d love to have that and pay for it. I can see that no every industry (many of your customers) want this, so I have no idea what the burden to Rhino’s licensing price would be. Or if it makes more sense to have a separate plugin that can license those libraries (I’d say Pantone and Moldtech are the most important) and whoever wants that feature buys the plugin. So basically you license libraries. Just a thought.
This current approach of ‘we’ll build you tools so you get to be your own material alchemist’ is arcane and irrelevant today. It shouldn’t be discussed and considered as if it had any relevance, because it really doesn’t anymore. The people who are interested in that are already well served with. Ray/Octane/Corona/Arnold/Nerdbling/ShaderPørn/etc.
No matter how big the library, most of it will be unused by most people. We’re talking about surface finishes here, the scope of what people might want is infinite, no effort will ever be enough…and then you wind up with the interface problem of how to organize and navigate a giant library. You’ve made the perfect material I need right now, great, how am I supposed to find it?
While we’re all making slightly grandiose statements about how something that’s a bigger world than modeling works across different industries, I think this focus on the interface for editing materials is a red herring for the “99%” of users. There’s nothing intuitive about what any of the numbers in a shader mean, but at least today you can fiddle with them and get immediate feedback and stumble your way to some sort of understanding. A much bigger problem is getting more than one material on to a single object. Mapping decals, that kind of stuff you need to do to make a render look like there was some actual effort put into it. THAT’S the nightmare, having to work with Photoshop or whatever to make masks–which of course the 99% don’t even know that’s what you have to do, or unless you’re a CG pro it’s actually easier to resort to the utter garbage workflow of actually splitting up the model just to apply different colours. Try doing something about THAT.
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Please don’t create confusion. No one here before your comments was asking for shear quantity, quite the opposite, we were asking for a quality library.
Like most commands in Rhino, or like most spices in the supermarket isle, …or like most people who have fire or kidnapping insurance. The whole point of having such solutions ready is to address potential need, not maximizing daily use for material. You are measuring success of a service wrong here.
This has been solved in Keyshot, Modo, probably others, with a revolutionary tool: a search field (besides the simple hierarchy of materials organized in folder by material types. Also perfectly documented in every major rendering package with a library: Rhino staff has not much more work to do that just follow the existing industry practices. Which seems simple for me saying it, but we know about their stubbornness and their pride in ignorance when they usually say: “we do not look at other products” or “we are not familiar with your industries”… 
You are absolutely right, and like Andy also said, these things are not mutually exclusive. I can also tell you from experience working with very unsophisticated and mostly illiterate users when it comes to renderings and material creation that having an awesome library with excellent looking materials is the best way to let those users see those settings in action and see what makes those gorgeous material loos so gorgeous. Obtaining a desired result by hopefully and randomly ‘stumbling upon’ something by mindlessly changing settings is a monumental waste of time and a frustrating experience that leads to defeat, instead of leading to learning and discovery.
An excellent library is both: giving people fish and also teaching them how to fish. There’s zero downside to making this happen. If only 10% of users find this useful it will probably be a lot more useful than many other endeavor McNeel is pursuing right now, including all the SubD work assuming it reached production-level execution.
Yes, every single user that has to deal with this will agree 100% here. It’s unacceptable that this hasn’t been properly solved in Rhino yet. Same issue apples to mapping, not just material assignment. Also @Mark_Landsaat pointed out last week how this limitation is now even inherited in SubD objects. Rhino is making the first SubD modeler in the world that I have even seen where you cannot assign color/materials to individual polygons/SubD faces. This is below threshold today for a shipping product.
Bingo.
Correction: “we do not look at other products” and “we are not in the business of copying other companies solutions.”
This is because we believe in solving our users problems, not replicating them. If that makes me stubborn, guilty as charged.
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