Use Canvas materialmaps to automatically infer additional mappings for block.properties

[coderbot16]

Shader packs have a block.properties file that has rough purpose of defining materials. For example, a shader pack may link minecraft:oak_leaves and the other leaf blocks to a given ID, such as block.18. Then, the given block ID (or, more properly, a material ID), is used to selectively apply certain affects. For example, leaf and foliage blocks generally wave, water generally takes on completely different rendering, and lava has some general wavy effects.

Unfortunately, few shaderpacks include support for mods. This means that your Terrestria sakura leaves won't wave with most shaderpacks, for example. And, even when shaderpacks support mods, often they only support popular mods, and even then only partially.

Canvas has a similar system in the form of materialmaps. Materialmaps are designed in a much better way and fully support mods. Since many mods include built-in support for Canvas materialmaps, Iris could read these files in order to automatically apply affects such as leaf waving to modded blocks. It should be fairly easy to reverse-engineer materials from block ID groupings: for example if all vanilla leaf blocks map to block.18, it's safe to say that block.18 is the render material for leaves.

Ironically, this could mean that installing something like More Canvas Compat would also help with Iris compatibility.