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I have some questions regarding the new material editor:

- If i select "Alpha Only" for a loaded PNG it displays only a white image in the texture preview. The rendering is correct. Is this a bug or a feature?

- It is no longer possible to let the texture window open while working in the main window. Feature, bug or limitation?

- The reload button in the texture window is gone... does this mean that the texture gets updated automatically now?

mmh...

Stupid questions? Or too difficult to answer? User error?

Hi Numerobis,

numerobis wrote: - If i select "Alpha Only" for a loaded PNG it displays only a white image in the texture preview. The rendering is correct. Is this a bug or a feature?

"Alpha only" should just display the alpha channel, I have just done a quick test and one texture worked fine and other failed so we will take a look to see if there is a bug here.

numerobis wrote: - It is no longer possible to let the texture window open while working in the main window. Feature, bug or limitation?

We decided to make the texture/color picker dialogs modals in v3. The main reason to do that is that now with procedural textures you could have maps inside maps, and it was too confusing to do that with one global picker. However we rewrote the pickers so when you change something both Fire and openGL viewports get refreshed.

numerobis wrote: - The reload button in the texture window is gone... does this mean that the texture gets updated automatically now?

Now when the mouse focus goes back to Studio it updates the texture files that have changed.

numerobis wrote: Stupid questions? Or too difficult to answer? User error?

No, it's just the first weekend since August, literally

Juan

juan wrote: No, it's just the first weekend since August, literally

sorry... i didn't want to disturb you on your well deserved weekend! Sometimes when i'm working on weekends i forget that other people maybe have a weekend. Sorry for that
Have a nice evening!
And thanks for the answers.

juan wrote: We decided to make the texture/color picker dialogs modals in v3. The main reason to do that is that now with procedural textures you could have maps inside maps, and it was too confusing to do that with one global picker. However we rewrote the pickers so when you change something both Fire and openGL viewports get refreshed.

That's very sad... i really liked the way it worked in V2.
Maybe you could have applied this limitation to the procedural dialog only.

numerobis wrote: Have a nice evening!
And thanks for the answers.

Thanks, you are very welcome

numerobis wrote:

juan wrote: We decided to make the texture/color picker dialogs modals in v3. The main reason to do that is that now with procedural textures you could have maps inside maps, and it was too confusing to do that with one global picker. However we rewrote the pickers so when you change something both Fire and openGL viewports get refreshed.

That's very sad... i really liked the way it worked in V2.
Maybe you could have applied this limitation to the procedural dialog only.

We had concerns about it too, but I must say that testers got used to the new pickers very quickly and all of them agreed about this change soon. We might consider to get this behavior only for procedurals, this area is going to be under deep development in the next months so we will review our design decisions and will try to make the pickers as user friendly as possible.

Thanks,

Juan

ok, thanks!

We had concerns about it too, but I must say that testers got used to the new pickers very quickly and all of them agreed about this change soon. We might consider to get this behavior only for procedurals, this area is going to be under deep development in the next months so we will review our design decisions and will try to make the pickers as user friendly as possible.

Thanks,

Juan

Please changes as much back as possible.. (to the workflow of 2.7) it's really inconvenient!

We decided to make the texture/color picker dialogs modals in v3. The main reason to do that is that now with procedural textures you could have maps inside maps, and it was too confusing to do that with one global picker. However we rewrote the pickers so when you change something both Fire and openGL viewports get refreshed.

I'm getting nasty pains in my wrist just because of this one thing. I will have to go back to 2.7 for now.

Just to make sure this is clear:

- you can still do interactive changes to textures/colors using FIRE, or material previews while you have a color or texture picker open. Just make sure that you start FIRE before opening a texture picker, or for mat previews, make sure you turn on the lock icon next to the mat preview thumb, and then open a tex picker/color picker.

one problem that occured to me several times now. that on some material configuration I can't set the material preview to diffuse channel. it always stay weight map. by that the material in cinema is transparent with texture.

seems to happen all the time when the material has no map in reflective 0 but only in bump, spec and weight. had this happened on some of my brushed metals where theres no bitmap in refl 0 of course.

any ideas? cheers

Mihai wrote:Just to make sure this is clear:

- you can still do interactive changes to textures/colors using FIRE, or material previews while you have a color or texture picker open. Just make sure that you start FIRE before opening a texture picker, or for mat previews, make sure you turn on the lock icon next to the mat preview thumb, and then open a tex picker/color picker.

Well yeah sure you can but the whole workflow is still much less intuitive as in 2.7. With a color/texture picker window open you can not change ANY setting. I think it's very nifty if you can hold a color window open on one side and a texture window open on the other.

I'm very glad my boss upgraded to 3.0 and not me, these things need to be fixed first before I will consider upgrading. There are still a lot of things that were better in 2.7.

Ok, I've thought about this interface issue a little bit.

I understand for the needs of future expansion that you need a 'nodal' dialogue for procedurals. But why not create the branching point 1 step earlier in mxed's main window, so keep the old map dialogue that behaves like normal software AND have another icon right next to the mapping icon, which opens the nodal dialogue. I may have missed something, but this approach seems logical.

Also, as far as I can tell, the only proven usefullness of procedurals will be at larger scales where you need to map a large area but also need to see it close up, For anything at regular scales image maps work great given a little bit of photoshop knowledge. (and avoiding tiling is easy if you offset your maps and give different repeat rates)

The convenience aspect of geometric procedurals such as simple grids etc. is quite negated by their lack of flexibility IMO, again this stuff is NOT time consuming nor complicated, to do in photoshop.

So please, please, please create an awesome procedural dialogue which focusses on mapping large areas, esp large organic areas. and please keep areas of the interface that we use endlessly, as clean and quick as possible.

BTW, another good use I found for procedurals is to randomise the colour of grass blades, (I used the 'brick' procedural)

+1

Is the stored preview function broken?

In V2 I used to 'store' lots of options for a material I was working on and flick between them using the arrows until I found one I liked. In V3 not only have the very useful arrows gone (!) but the right click, choose a preview either doesn't work or caused MXED to crash.

Can you confirm this bug please.

I started a topic on this a few months back: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 13&t=41680

But no reply..