armory3d
Material and Brush property panel
The node system is really great for creating powerful materials in any imaginable way. While texturing having to access the node editor all the time feels a bit complicated for me. Especially if one has to touch various nodes in order to achieve the desired change.
- Suppose the user defined a plastic material with a certain roughness structure and maybe some other features to create an interesting surface. If the user wants to change the plastic color, the node editor has to be opened.
- Suppose th user built a gradient material and wants to change the colors.
- Suppose the user built an edgewear material. It is natural to change the strength, fuzziness, ...
- Suppose the user designed a special brush. Now it is always necessary to change the stencil or the lazy step.
- Suppose the user built a "stamp/stencil/decal"-material and wants to change the alpha-pattern.
I think all these situations occur frequently and slow down the texturing process. To solve this problem I had the idea to transfer the system of node groups to materials, brushes (and particles). I imagine the user to have a "Material Parameter"-node. It works exactly like the Group input node with the additional feature to take combo-boxes as values (it might be a good extension to Group input node, too). The right sidebar gets a property panel for materials, brushes and particles. The property panel more or less works like the Group node of a node group and has a scroll bar in case the needed height is bigger than the available one. Additionally I added the checkboxes for the different channels a material can have.
In an implementation the property panel would also have tabs for brush and particle and not just for a material.
The vision is now that ArmorPaint ships a certain amount of prebuilt brushes, materials, ... that have some parameters to be adjusted by the user. I'm sure a "call for materials and brushes" would inspire many users to contribute some for the cloud. The mobile versions of ArmorPaint would also benefit from these panels as they are easier to use by touch.
