[Half Life]

Exactly -- and for that matter a more powerful system of UV generation or support for a 3rd-party plugin would be something I would see as building on a foundation already established...

And then of course is my personal pet project which is the Physical Sky system could stand to be seriously upgraded (Moon, Stars and Clouds) -- and again that would only be an extension of how things already work.

Generating textures is not a Maxwell feature -- the closest you get is anisotropy and R2 for faux cloth... adding texture generating capabilities directly within MXMs would be a huge undertaking.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

yes, sure, this would be nice... but if this means another 4 years without a dirt shader in maxwell i would prefer the ordinary AO/Cavity way first to get something to work with.

Re-reading your post I see you were talking about AO/Cavity mapping and not procedurals -- Substance Designer will not help on that front and I'm afraid you are likely barking up the wrong tree on that one in Maxwell as they would have to implement AO rendering to enable this and it has been shot down numerous times as being against the Maxwell unbiased theme.

In honesty if you want those capabilities then maybe my idea about adding plugin support for ZBrush and/or 3DCoat is the better way to go -- then you can access those features in an environment made for them... as far as implementation it would be as simple as importing/applying the AO map as a layer opacity mask in MXED... although I will say I think that AO/cavity mapping is pretty cheesy looking in most cases without some serious hand doctoring.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... =2&t=34375

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

Even if your favorite 3D-program doesn't support 3d-Painting/Map-Creation - there's excellent Bridges to many Modellers from Zbrush, Mudbox and 3DCoat.
The latter at this point has a relatively weak AO-Renderer but it is easy for Programmers to hook it up as linked Application for Texture-Work
(there's an SDK +Installer for this task). The awesome thing here is that 3DCoat can paint without having to subdivide the Geometry first - quite in contrast to Zbrush.
This makes bringing in Geometry from Nurbs-Modelers and also SketchUp easy. A Rhino-Plugin is on the way.