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Some material editor ideas

arno

arno

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Hi all,

One of the plans for version 1.4 is to improve the material editor. What I basically want to do is combine the material editor, mass texture editor and the drawcall minimizer in one form. So that there is one logical place for all material and texture related activities.

In the attached pictures I have sketched some ideas for this updated material editor. Please let me know what you think about it and if you have suggestions that would make it more useful for you.

This is the basic design I have in mind:

  • At the top of the form there is a toolbar which has button to remove a material, run the drawcall minimizer and a combobox to select a material preset to apply to the selected material.
  • At the left side of the screen is a list of all materials in this model, so that you can select the one to work with (multiple selection will probably also be supported).
  • At the right you then have a tabbed view where you can select three options:

  1. (first sketch) Properties. This shows the property grid to edit all the material settings. Like the current material editor.
  2. (second sketch) Similarities view. This shows other materials that are similar to the selected one. A material would be similar when it uses the same diffuse texture, but has some other material settings different. The tab would list all the differences found and probably a link to jump back to the property grid to adjust the differences. It might also be an idea to put the drawcall minimizer in this tab and not in the toolbar at the top.
  3. (third sketch) Textures view. This would show a matrix of all textures used in the object. Currently you can only see the diffuse texture in the material editor, but I think it would be good to see the subtextures as well. When clicking on the texture it should be enlarged to fill the entire tab. On this tab I would also like to include the mass texture editor. So that you can get some kind of list view where you can select formats to change to or sizes to resize to.

Let me know what you think about this. Especially on how to incorporate the mass texture editor and the drawcall minimizer in the most efficient way, I would like to have your ideas as well.
 

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Hi Arno,

This looks great. Do you think ModelconverterX could extract Material settings to a "library", as well as apply basic presets.

The idea, of course, being able to later apply these to a different model to make the settings identical.
 
Hi,

My idea is that you can define your own presets. Although I more had it in mind for things like a reflection recipe or so. I guess you also mean the entire material. But should be possible.

Send from my phone using Tapatalk, so excuse the short sentences and possible typos
 
At the risk of being feature greedy, I am sure both would be useful, and have slightly different uses.

One would be to simplify materials, the other to ensure uniformity between models.
 
Both are on my wishlist already.

The function to check similarity between materials is also supposed to work on multiple objects, for example an entire library.

Send from my phone using Tapatalk, so excuse the short sentences and possible typos
 
I didn't follow all of the MCX discussions lately, but I'd like more options for batch jobs, for example a simple run through of all MDLs to ensure specular is off or draw call batching is on, shadows are removed or something like that.
Then I think it'd be cool to be able to create some sort of log file that includes all settings of all MDLs in a folder. So I put all MDLs I want to test into a certain folder and run the job. The job then creates a simple xml file or data sheet that shows which model uses which BMP with shadows on or off, specular on or off, LM textures, tweaked model and so on. :)
 
Hi Thorsten,

Once I have those material presets implemented I also want to include them in the batch converter. So then you can set a certain preset (specular off) to all models at once.

Did you check the object report function? It already makes an overview of the textures used by each model. It is saved as a HTML file. I want to improve that further, but it might be a basis for the overview you are looking for.
 
Not surprised you already built in the best ideas. :D

I'll have a closer look, sometimes I can't even keep up with downloading the latest dev release. Really fantastic work! :)
 
Hi Arno!


Fantastic! I'm very happy that you work on this. Mass texture editor would speed up my work a lot.

How to combine the three functions to one page is rather difficult. My suggestion is here:

21l72bq.jpg


Top left window is the box for the input files (can be bgl library or mdl's), works similar as the batch converting wizzard today. When all files are added by the user below there is a button to read files, MCX opens the files and makes a list in the box in the middle about all kind of different materials found. In this box if you select one material the details is shown in the right material editor.
Below there could be a box which similar to batch convert where you can add modification(s). You can apply these modification to those material(s) which are selected in the list above.
Than we need somewhere a compile or something button and a field where we can input the target folder.

It is just an idea, maybe I did not think of all aspect you want to implement.
 
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Hi,

My idea is to put those batch material updates in the existing batch wizard, not make it another wizard.

I plan that you can define a material profile or preset somewhere and then in the batch wizard you can choose which preset you want to apply to the models.
 
Dear Arno,
I think your sketches are very good.
I'm not a computer guy so I'm not sure my suggest is possible.

Why don't do that like this? Making the material as a header and the properties show in the window below with scroll bar. This way we can compare the material if they use the same properties or different. We can check if they make another drawcall by using different properties in the same bitmap.

By the picture no 3, I think the windows of each material will be so small. And we don't need to compare the 4 properties or more at a time. Two or three materials each time are enough for the eyes, I think.

I also think if you set up drawcall minimizer to set up those materials that use the same bitmap to have the same properties automatically would be the best. Set up one as a template and others follow this template. The template might be on the first column and the following columns are the follower. Then make a header like a switch to clicking to convert those properties to be the same.

Just imagination, I have no idea if it is possible.
Thanks for making us such a wonderful tool.

Regards,
Tic
 
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Thanks for the input, I'll keep it in mind.

Send from my phone using Tapatalk, so excuse the short sentences and possible typos
 
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