hypershade suggestions

[userX4542]

I've posted many times before about the hypershade and want to touch on it again because posting all the little issues, distracts from the bigger picture. I also want to stress again how much room for improvement there is here. I would appreciate it if someone from Autodesk could respond.

- Performance. The hypershade is slow.

- Graphing materials. Materials don't graph all nodes (displacement maps go missing)

- Duplicating materials. It's very unreliable

- Assigning materials. This is the biggest and most fundamental problem. In order to assign a material, you do so by assigning a shader. I highly recommend that assigning materials should happen by assigning shading groups, as this is ultimately what happens behind scenes in order for the whole network to take effect.

- Node placement. Nodes don't stay in the position they were left in. They always get reorganised... badly

- Screenspace. Very inefficient use of screenspace due to the amount of clutter.

- Browser. The way the materials are listed becomes unmanageble.

- Design.  The nodes are clunky, ugly and displaying their input is illogical. Either the lists of outputs are too short or too long. 

-Adding shaders. When adding shaders to a material network, Maya automatically makes a new shading group for no reason. (we all know the reason.... maya's shader/shading group system doesn't make sense)

Solutions and ideas!

It would be great if autodesk could adopt the workflows from Softimage. In Softimage there were two 'hypershade-ish' windows.

The material manager:

and the render tree:

The hypershade is basically a bad version of the material manager. And considering that, the material manager hardly gets used. What people use 9 out of 10 times is the render tree. This is what maya is missing. The render tree always opens !instantly! and graphs the nodes on your selected object. The nodes then always stay in the same place where you left them. 

Soft's 'Materials' (= maya's 'shading group') is what you assign to your objects as it's where all the inputs lead.

If you add a shader to your tree, it does not add a new 'material' aka 'shading group' because it's just a node like any other. 

Duplicating materials just worked.

Another very good feature is pressing 'M' in the explorer to view a list of all your materials. This could also happen in the outliner. The symbol next to a material would indicate if it has been assigned or not. It's a very handy way to get an overview of your scene.

http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/xsidocs/surface_shaders_ViewingMaterialsintheExplorer.html

Thanks, I would very much appreciate if someone could get back to me on this. It's one of the most horrible features of Maya that is clearly under-developed, poorly thought through and badly integrated. Especially coming from Softimage.

[Anonymous]

I've been railing about the Hypershade for years, but it's only gotten worse. A couple of the problems you mention are unbelievable -- duplicate shading network sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, sometimes duplicates the whole network, other times only one node. Sometimes the new network shows in the work area, sometimes it doesn't. And every time you do it, your graphed network gets completely shuffled in the viewport which is absolutely infuriating when trying to complete some detailed multi-node wiring. I never, ever use the completely redundant AE that they crowbarred into the Hypershade a view versions ago -- why would you need a watered-down copy of another menu taking up space in this way?  Considering shader development is obviously one of the most important aspects of 3D production, the Hypershade is an absolute joke.

[Kloworks]

the Softimage dev team they already part of Maya team, so yeah hope they take care of the hypershade.
I use Softimage before maya and yeah its true all what you said @userX4542 @Anonymous

still Softimage more creative than Maya, hope you give it one push to upgrade the hypershade.

[Kranos_Orphydian]

never touched Softimage but **** it loooked sexy, an old but sexy lady lol