[Polyxo]

I would like to have a simple mechanism built into Maxwell's Material-Editor which allows for quick duplication
of a material with another stack of Channel-Textures.

Usage-example: One wants to use different materials for all legs of a table and needs a second and third and forth
mxm which only differ by the stack of images used. Currently one needs to do this wiring by hand, which is tedious.

All dedicated texture-map editors (Crazybump, Shadermap, Substance-Designer, Pixplant, Ndo etc.) but also 3D-Painting
Applications such as Zbrush, Mudbox, Mari, or 3DCoat output stacks of files with telling - and often also configurable name-additons.
These mark files to be displacement, normal or any other channel.
Anybody doing such work manually in an image-editor probably uses certain name-coding too.

Whenever using any of the above-mentioned applications one outputs at least four maps:
- diffuse(e.g. name_DIFF)
- specular (e.g. name_SPEC)
- normal (e.g. name_NOR)
- displacement (e.g. name_DISP)
It could be more maps though, like Ambient Occlusion or some custom Clip-Maps too.

I think it was time that the Material-Editor learned to deal with these prefixes or suffixes!
Not even in a pseudo intelligent way... By leaving all "cleverness" away it should work with even with very complex and non-standard mxms
It should work in all Plugins too. All what I believe was required to get this working was a simple script which checks whether a texture with certain,
previously configured and stored name-additons from a list is already in place.

Details:
When running the requested command from the Material-Editor Maxwell should...

1) clone a material of choice (myredmaterial)

2) then bring up an File-Open-dialog. The User now picks any of the channel-maps of the stack of textures she wishes to be transferred to a mxm
mybluematerial_NOR. The script at this point is only interested in the actual file-name: mybluematerial

3) The command would identify maps with the same name in the specified path and runs them against the cloned mxm.
Whenever it finds a map with the same name-addon it replaces it it with the equivalent with newly specified base-file-name.
Example: In Layer BASE, BSDF1 the Script finds in the diffuse slot of a map myredmaterial_DIFF. It then replaces it with mybluematerial_DIFF.
It does the same with all texture-maps it finds in the duplicated .mxm.

The script had to allow the configuration of valid name-additons.

Hopefully this all was understandable. I believe such was a great workflow-enhancement.

Thanks, Holger