why cant i use the material and load it into the texture of a custom material?
I am curious to know what sequence of steps is necessary to get that dialog
create an object, go to layer materials, turn type to custom, click assign texture, click more types, click import you should land in the rhino render content folder, select architectural or any other folder and chose a material.
i assume materials dont work as texture, but i think its just too complicated… i am honestly pretty tired of rhinos complicated material mess…
by the way i also tried your plugin and there are so many things not working properly on the mac side that i also had to give up there for now, i know i can export and render external with bella but i had no time for now. i also followed that there are certain things not working from rhino side which are making your life trying to implement bella into rhino difficult if i am not mistaken. i hope all that gets resolved at some point 
i honestly would not mind if bella would replace cylces, more gimmicks on board !
thanks – funny how things go, I think I may have never once clicked that particular import button (the one at the top of the content chooser dialog), so I was trying different ways, and not yet seeing how the heck you were able to do it
so it looks like being due to an oversight on that specific button (checked on windows too, same occurs there) failing to restrict the types of files allowed to be selected, which are properly restricted when e.g. using textures panel > right-click > import from texture library
(regarding bella, mac & windows use the same code, so they both get features added as they are requested)
ic, so the same issues are on windows either? not saying there are some i might have dreamed that up due to lack of time… sorry if i babble so far out of context, i will give you details once i get back to normal schedule in my life.
I guess it depends what you mean by issues – and maybe worth mentioning that one thing specific to mac, if on apple silicon, would be to check any problem on the rhino 8 wip to rule out any potential rosetta issues
but I had read “things not working properly” as lack of exposing some bella features yet in rhino – but if you have some crash or misbehavior I would want to know what it is, and take care of it