Materials Editor

[Anonymous]

• The Materials Editor should highlight what materials are used by the selected item.

• When selecting a material in the editor, the faces using this material could also highlight in the scene.

• The physical material should also be listed within the same dialogue box, as it would save clicking around in menus.

• The thumbnail illustrating customized materials currently do not function well — they do not reflect the actual look defined by the user.

[roambotics_scott]

I really like the idea of combining physical materials with appearances - I get that they're in some sense fundamentally different but it still seems arbitrary and redundant to have to open and go through separate panels for them.

[Helmi74]

I agree. The UI isn't that good in the material library though after the redesign it has gotten better already. But there's still room for improvement. 

I also find it a bit strange to have to drag the material on an object although i already right-clicked that selected object to open the material library. I always click that material first waiting that it gets assigned to the selected object. After that i notice that it doesn't and that i have to drag&drop it.

[colin.smith]

Thanks for the suggestions Panzinip. The last item on your list is a known issue and we are looking to resolve it. WRT the first two items, are you suggesting that clicking on an applied material swatch in the Appearance window would automatically highlight the faces/bodies that the material has been assigned to?

[haughec]

Thanks for the input, everyone.

We agree that materials/appearances should cross-highlight between the canvas and the dialog - this improvement is in our backlog.  In fact, one of the reasons that we assign materials/appearances only by drag & drop (and not by clicking) is that we anticipate selection of a material swatch to cross-highlight in the canvas.

The thumbnails for customized materials are definitely lacking.  We're working on this now, and we hope to have it resolved in an August release.

For better or worse, we chose to separate Physical Materials from Appearances because the previous UI did not to a sufficient job of distinguishing the two, and this was often a point of confusion.  What if there was an easy way to transition between to two commands?  Perhaps an access point (button, tab, etc) in each dialog that would essentially move from one command to the other.  Would that help?

Thanks,

Charles