Map Soloing

[Anonymous]

When fine tuning a map, its frequently helpful to see what a specific map or map chain wil look like out of context with how its being used. Like lets say you have a cellular map in the bump slot of a material, and a noise inside the cellular, frequently you want to see just the noise pattern and adjust it till you're happy with it before then seeing the whole pattern in context. So I'd like to see "Map Soloing" added to the medit. This is a feature similar to "Show Map In Viewport", except it works in the full render, not just in the viewport (since many of the maps, especially procedurals, when shown in the viewport, show incorrect results.)

When turned on in a map, that map and any maps below it in the map chain will appear in the render as though this map were placed in the diffuse slot of a fully self illuminated material. See example below. Unsoloing the map will return things to its normal state where the noise is used in the cellular in the bump of the original material. Mudbox has a siimilar feature which I've found quite helpful.

[SuperRune]

Great idea!

[eugenio_miolo]

Ohhh boy I miss this a lot! In Blender you can do that and it's really really useful.

[Anonymous]

For those who can't wait there is a component in the Soulburnscripts package called texmapPreview with this specific function. I use it a lot in my workflow, so I guess it would be handy to have such feature native to 3dsmax.

[Anonymous]

While my script texmap preview does do something similar, it can be a little fragile, so having the function built into max would leave much less room for error.