There should be a way to map "real" materials to the simple materials in SketchUp

[drwave]

Upon export, it would be great if the exporter allowed a mapping of the simple material (i.e. just a texture map) that SketchUp has to some more complex material that was leveraging all the parameters of the UsdPreviewShader.

There are several ways this could be accomplished:

• export the names of all the materials in the .skp file, and then import a mapping of those to values, perhaps encoded as a .json file.

Have a UI that presented the texture images on one side and a palette of discovered materials on the other side. Using drag and drop you could map one to the other.

Probably makes sense to start off with some .json based scheme and then perhaps do a UI later.

The big issue is what is that representation of rich materials look like? Is there any effort to generate these? Is this something Substance Designer could help with?