A “Dynamic Paint” or if you have a better name, never the less is something I find to be very useful to incorporate in Rhino 8 and I would like to suggest it.
In a nutshell. Applying materials can sometimes be very tedious in Rhino. So a command where you can quickly select the material you’d like to apply from a drop box, and apply it either per surface or per object is very useful. Where you can apply materials to multiple surfaces/objects simultaneously without leaving the command. In a way similar to Sketchup’s Paint Bucket tool. But I suggest adding two options. “By Surface” or “By Object”. This way we can apply materials quickly to individual surfaces and not to the entire polysurface. Also if the material drop box can be made interative. Where we can select different materials very intuitively and apply them quickly to different surfaces.
Very Helpful!! Hope you can add it to Rhino8. Would be greatly appreciated.
V9 would be the earliest target, since V8’s feature set is a done deal.
So if I understand you correctly, the workflow you are after is this: You select a material you want to apply, and then a command, let’s call it _Paint for now, allows you to keep painting (sub)objects by clicking on the (sub)object until that command is ended by the user?
A workflow that may help is to sub-object select polysrf faces and also use shift to add whole objects to the selection. Then right click any material swatch and choose Assign to Objects. So rather than entering a paint bucket mode, you select first and then assign through the right click menu on the material preview. You can also use Select Objects from the material preview’s right click menu to quickly reselect objects and sub-objects with that material assigned. There is a command called RenderAssignMaterialToObjects as well that could be used but I prefer the first method myself.
Note that SubD objects do not support sub-object (face) materials but this is filed as https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-56446 and sub-objects can’t use a different mapping channel then the whole object. Support for that one is filed as RH-49106 for future reference.
@Gijs Yes, but you launch the command at the very beginning, a menu of all the materials appear, you select the material from the menu, and apply it either per surface (subobject) or per object. Where you can quickly toggle and select different materials back and forth, before ending the command. Very similar to bucket paint in Sketchup.
@BrianJ I believe what you described exists, but once again, if you had a chance to try Sketchup’s Paintbucket tool. It’s much faster and intuitive. I don’t want to control-shift every single subobject in a polysurface. I just want to single left-click and apply materials to individual surfaces quickly. I know the feature exists in another form right now. But what I am describing would increase speed of assigning materials, especially handy in hardsurface modeling where there is a plenty of material combinations, or complex shapes with many materials/textures.