Suggestions for materials

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hello,

Here are a few suggestion regarding materials management:

The following can currently be done by manually editing the mat files (not convenient and error prone):

• add the capability to reparent materials: ex drag a material B and drop it on material A so B inherit A (of course A and B being compatible)
• add the capability to regroup materials under a new common parent (just like we can do with nodes) (the common attributes would be moved up the hierarchy)
• add the capability to 'unparent' a material (the unparented material would have the current attributes applied, keeping it visually unchanged))

The following cannot currently be done at all:

• highlight/filters materials in the material browser on a mesh when a mesh is selected
• highlight/filters unused materials in the material browser (already suggested in another post)
• multiple Asset browsers: currently it's a pain to navigate to compare multiple materials to eliminate duplicates or merge similar materials
• some way to find/merge duplicate (or near duplicate) materials

Thanks!

[silent]

Hi Stephane,

That's a lot of suggestions, thank you!

We will review them later with our artists and see what we can safely implement inside the Editor as default functionality.

And I also have couple of commentaries for the 'cannot currently be done' section:

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• highlight/filters materials in the material browser on a mesh when a mesh is selected

Isn't that default behavior right now? I can select mesh and surfaces and all the materials will be highlighted:

 

 

 

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• highlight/filters unused materials in the material browser (already suggested in another post)

As far as I know Cleaner tool is already can detect such materials, but if you will delete them your project may become broken. Right now there is no reliable method to find out which materials is really not required at all (because some of the materials can be used by code and this code can be even outside of your project). So right now aspect should be controlled by artists / developers (with a small help from a Cleaner tool).

 

 

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• multiple Asset browsers: currently it's a pain to navigate to compare multiple materials to eliminate duplicates or merge similar materials

Yeah, there was a plan to add multiple asset browsers initially, but for some reason there was not so many activity recently. I will try to find out the current status and will get back to you as soon as I will get more information.

 

 

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• some way to find/merge duplicate (or near duplicate) materials

That's can be implemented currently outside of the editor as an additional optimization part of your project (or even as an Editor plugin). We currently have no plans to do it, since the criteria of 'near duplicate' and 'duplicate' materials are different for each project. Maybe these materials are duplicated for a reason - to be able to access individual parameters of specific materials in runtime (without modifying other objects).

We are also plan to improve Editor plugins workflow in the upcoming 2.15 update, so it should become more easier to write your own small Editor helpers for daily usage.

[Amerio.Stephane]

3 hours ago, silent said:

Isn't that default behavior right now? I can select mesh and surfaces and all the materials will be highlighted:

I should have be more clear, sorry. Currently, indeed, selecting a mesh also selects the materials, but all the others are still visible. So if the highlighted materials are far from each other in the hierarchy you don't see them all at once. And if you need to edit all of them, then you have to somehow "remember" where they are to select and edit them one by one. Of course, I can open multiple property editors, but this become tedious and crowded above 1 or 2 extra property windows. A suggestion could be to have a way in the browser to temporarily "hide unselected".

Regarding the Cleaner tool, I have a hard time using it, as I find the UI not very intuitive (and deleting things is frightening, maybe just select things instead, or dump the list to a text file for later review?). Maybe it's just me. Maybe we could have an additional column in the material browser view simply showing a tick if the material is used? I do understand that this would only show materials used by nodes and not by code, and some materials could be left for future usage, but in our case it's very frequent to have a material created at import that we simply want to discard after creating the correct one.

Regarding duplicate criterion: yes you are so very right (!). Each project/individual could have their own criterion. But at the moment we couldn't find the energy/know-how to create an editor plugin for such a task. Actually, an Editor plugin template for some common task would be more than welcome.

Thanks!

[silent]

Actually, default editor plugin is already available in SDK. Here is guide how to use it: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.14.1/editor2/extensions/custom_plugin?rlang=cs

Regarding the Cleaner tool UI/UX issues - please don't hesitate to report them in a separate thread. This tool can cover some of your requests (at least with fully unused materials).

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Currently, indeed, selecting a mesh also selects the materials, but all the others are still visible. So if the highlighted materials are far from each other in the hierarchy you don't see them all at once. And if you need to edit all of them, then you have to somehow "remember" where they are to select and edit them one by one. 

Hm, I guess you can do an easy trick and get all the material in a single window. All you need to do is to select mesh from the hierarchy, drop it to the asset browser to any directory (to create a .node file) and then you can right-click on this node and select Show Assets Used. After that you should be able to see similar window:

Maybe that will be also useful in your case.

Thanks!

[werner.poetzelberger]

Some 'standard' filter on/off s in the material browser would definitely help (I mentioned that in an other post).
eg: in-scene, selected, standard material.

A tagging/taxonomy system would be a great tool, which has more flexibility and could be applied to basically every item.

 

 

[Amerio.Stephane]

19 minutes ago, silent said:

Hm, I guess you can do an easy trick and get all the material in a single window. All you need to do is to select mesh from the hierarchy, drop it to the asset browser to any directory (to create a .node file) and then you can right-click on this node and select Show Assets Used. After that you should be able to see similar window:

Hey nice trick! Thanks :) Still I think this feature could be integrated in the Editor more elegantly.