Dev:Ref/Requests/Materials

General

Volume and Surface Combo

Make it possible to give an object Volumetric opacity, but the Specularity and mirror that Surface Materials have. This is important for Glass and Colored Liquids.

Halo and Wireframe grouping

Allow multiple halo and wireframe materials on a single object, like how assign is used for surface materials.

Plug-in Materials method

Instead of the current, slightly cluttered materials pages, I think there may be a better approach. Have all of the Col, Nor, Disp, Alpha - etc, etc - channels as pages for the materials section. In each of the areas of the material, you have a standardised GUI, with only changes necessary for each section - everything that is necessary for each field remains the same. Each 'page' would probably have the ability to set a texture for it, although I feel shader is a better word, as I always think of a texture being the 'Image Texture' we have at the moment. In order to layer several effects onto one channel, there would be one shader/texture, which takes two or more others, and users a third to blend them together. For example, say you wanted to make the surface of something look rusty. Rather than using one texture of combined metal/rust, you could take the metal, the rust and a third alpha map to blend them together. What we now call shaders would be combined into a single 'highlight page,' and again you could use specular maps that control both the strength and colour of specularity across the object. A specific part of this would be the ramp shaders, which would simply need integrating into this page as an editable gradient.

Multilayered materials

A material compound by other material layers (not textures)

use material nodes and/or multiple UV Textures--Roger 15:34, 9 April 2007 (CEST)
Ok :), could be erased or move it to a Done section (I don't know if I should do it, as I created this request or should do it a moderator), it could be done perfectly with nodes but I think that not exactly with multiple UV textures if you want to mix specular maps, normal maps, .... in different mixed regions of a object ...--Otomo 20:28, 3 March 2008 (GMT+1)

A material browser who can display any number of material

The oultiner seems to be a good place to add this, possibly make a set of recently used material, all material, material category from a loaded library. Use either realtime display or make a caching system that would store the thumbs somewhere.

try the Materials Works python script.--Roger 15:36, 9 April 2007 (CEST)

materials which vary per rendered object or dupliverted copy

A detailed proposal is on my user page User:Halley.

Save Color Pallette in blend file

Can I ask if that palette could be saved in the .blend file? I just wrote Color Management yesterday for the wiki, and it seems to me that it would be excellent if you could set up those 16 color presets to the project, and not have to do the load-set thing every time you open the .blend. Would that be a lot of work? --Roger 15:13, 14 February 2008 (CET)

Nodes

Geometry Node (Modification)

Add ability to select which object to pull data from using drop down menu. This will allow procedural changes to affect materials based on relation to other obects.

Bartrobinson 04:37, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Light Node (New)

Allows user to select a light to pull data from using drop down menu. This will allow procedural changes to affect materials based on relation to lights.

Type: Input

Options: Light(object)

Outputs: Color (color), Global (vector), Local (vector), Ray (vector), Intensity (value), Distance (value)

Bartrobinson 04:37, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Material Blur Node (New/Modification)

Allows blurring of materials/textures in the material node editor, with the same options as the composite blur node.

AnthonyP 13:12, 06 April 2012 (UTC)

Raytrace Node (New)

Allow user to select another object or material via a drop down menu. Then cast a ray from the surface of the current material and return a value based on whether the ray hits the other object or material. Also return distance the ray traveled as a value.

Bartrobinson 04:42, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Pin Material Nodes (Modification)

Now you can edit only one (last selected) material at a time. For comparing hue, saturation, etc.. would be useful to "pin" on screen also other (unselected) material nodes. --Igor 02:35, 4 January 2007 (CET)

Wireframe Rendering and Material Improvements

The wireframe rendering system in Blender needs some improvements:

For Most of concept renderings the use of a wireframe rendering or a wireframe on shaded rendering is a must.

1: Wireframe thickness slider for the wireframe shading mode, maybe an adaptive wireframe thickness control or auto threshold, to correctly rendering small and big/far and close parts in a mesh.

2: Wireframe material override support for render passes, the material override for render layers does not support the wireframe shading mode.

3: Wireframe display in 3D view must be more accurate, because i found that when i try to visualize a mid or hi-poly mesh in viewport, most edges are not visible at all.