A Palette for shaders used in the scene (improving workflow)

JeremyD

A feature that I'd love to see is a palette that lists all the shaders you are currently using in your scene. When I'm applying shaders I feel like I'm navigating through multiple folders from different vendors to get to them, so this palette could be a quick area to select what you've used before and apply it to a surface somewhere else. I think that would help identify where it's being used and also help maintain a consistent look, too. 

Of course I'm still a newb, so if such a thing exists, I'd love to know where :-D

Jeremy

mjc1016

The problem is that 99% of the time you are NOT using different shaders!

If you look at the surface tab...you will see which SHADER is being used when you select a particular surface...your usual options for Iray would be the Iray Uber Base and for 3Delight they would be the Studio Default, AoA Subsurface or Omnifreaker UberSurface.  Everything else are just presets for those...the vast majority of 'shader' packs are just presets (yes there are a few that are shaders...but those will be listed as such).

JeremyD

I had a feeling that using the word shader might be too non-descript. :-) What about a list of recently used presets then? I was thinking the palette coud list items such as:

Recently Used
-------------------
* JaneVendor Laytex No.2
* JoeVendor Leather No.1
* etc,etc

Each item would then be clickable, which allows you to apply it to another object.

I think that would be a nice way to keep track of what's happening in your scene.   

mjc1016

That could be doable...but I'm not sure if the capabilies of Studio are quite 'there' yet.  It would probably require a bit more interaction with Smart Content/the database than there is now. 

The whole shader thing has been a pet peeve of mine for years...simply because this is the kind of thing that it leads to.  A lot of what goes on behind what you see in the UI relies on the actual, internal names of things and for 'shaders' it's the name of the actual shader the preset is for.  So because the internal names are the same and just the settings are changed, when you do some sort of lookup for the name, you'll get the name of the actual shader, not the preset.  But, Smart Content/metadata has the info on the preset...it would just be a matter of accessing THAT information and putting it into something useful.