Goals:

Clean up the user interface and fill in some of the missing features to allow for 'recoloring' to become more of a 'choose your material'. This will be accomplished through a new GUI, a new method for specifying parts to recolor, and supporting of user choice of additional per-region 'detail' textures that will be blended onto the outputs.

New Features (finished features...)

TUPartVariant
- Might not be able to fix icons, but if the rest works... might as well release with disclaimers.
- Should file stock bug report
New Recoloring UX
- New recoloring UI - use properly built Unity GO based UI system
- Use mouse to select part to apply colors to and/or apply colors from the GUI
Add support for mod-specific / grouped texture set/preset color/preset material handling
- Load data from within single mod-specific root nodes
Preset color system reworked
- Allow mod-specific presets. By default texture-sets will only have available the presets defined by that mod.
- Allow multiple mod-specific groups of preset colors to be defined. Each PresetColor definition can have one (or more?) 'groupName=' and/or have specific group-definition nodes with their own name and a list of color names.
- UI will allow for changing between the 'preset color group' currently displayed, and/or merge all available groups together for display as a single list (separators?)
- Preset colors will also use the mod-name-prefix system if defined inside of a mod-specific root node.
Per-recoloring-region detail map selection in UI
- Will need multiple additional samplers for the normal maps; can use texture-arrays?
- per-region Adjustable scaling
- New shader keyword?

UI Details

Create new GUI system using proper Unity UI creation (replace the immediate-mode UI)
- Create the UI in Unity Editor, pack into asset-bundle, load into TU manually (skip stock loading), link up elements to their fields/methods.
- Tabbed UI
  - Preset Color Selection
  - Manual Color Selection
  - Regional Detail Map Selection
- Less of a 'per-section-list' and more of a 'set your colors, click your targets' type setup.
- May still have a list of parts/sections on the vessel that are recolorable, but the main interface for selecting of these should be mouse-based through clicking on a part
  - e.g. while GUI is open, clicks onto the vessel will select a part.
  - Left click = select part, right click = select part + apply current colors to it?
- Other key-cobo needed to prevent stock functions? How to play nicely with stock/other mods that use
GUI should have 'color wheel' type selection for colors, slider for smoothness/metal values, text-input boxes for each for manual specification.

Regional Detail Map Details

Per-recoloring-region detail map selection in UI
- Each recoloring region (main/second/detail) can select a separate detail texture set to mix in with the existing texture
- Will require 'detail texture masks' to determine input mixing -- alpha channel of RGB mask?
- Will need multiple additional samplers for the normal maps; can use texture-arrays?
- per-region Adjustable scaling? (how to pull that off?)
- store data where?
  - Will need a full texture reference to restore the proper tex/materials, for each region
At least normal maps
Ideally another grayscale texture will be provided with diffuse/metal/smoothness modifications (each in one of the channels)
Will TU ship with any of these by default? Would anyone else be able to figure out how to create them properly?

Presets System Details

Preset Colors
- RGB, Smoothness, Metal
Preset Patterns
- mostly limited to specific parts or sets of parts?
Preset Materials?
Preset Color
Preset Detail Maps (see section above)
Allow users to permanently save colors, patterns, material presets.
Where to store data? Per-save, or game-wide?

UI Info

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/noesisgui-1-2-9282

Oct 25 '18 16:10 shadowmage45

Tinting Mode

Diffuse Lum	Diff-Norm	Detail	%	User Value	Tint	GUI Correction Factor	%	%D
0.549	0.471	0.078	0.143	0.500	0.583	2.125	0.134	-0.008
0.800	0.900	-0.100	-0.125	0.500	0.500	1.250	-0.200	-0.075
0.200	0.100	0.100	0.500	0.500	0.500	5.000	0.200	-0.300
0.500	0.600	-0.100	-0.200	0.700	0.700	2.000	-0.143	0.057
0.500	0.400	0.100	0.200	0.300	0.300	2.000	0.333	0.133

Linear Add Mode

Diffuse Lum	Diff-Norm	Detail	%	User Value	Linear Add	%	%D
0.549	0.471	0.078	0.143	0.500	0.578	0.136	-0.007
0.800	0.900	-0.100	-0.125	0.500	0.400	-0.250	-0.125
0.200	0.100	0.100	0.500	0.500	0.600	0.167	-0.333
0.500	0.600	-0.100	-0.200	0.700	0.600	-0.167	0.033
0.500	0.400	0.100	0.200	0.300	0.400	0.250	0.050

Extract then Multiply (Current functionality)

Diffuse Lum	Diff-Norm	Detail	%	User Value	Mult Add	%	%D
0.549	0.471	0.078	0.143	0.500	0.539	0.145	0.003
0.800	0.900	-0.100	-0.125	0.500	0.450	-0.222	-0.097
0.200	0.100	0.100	0.500	0.500	0.550	0.182	-0.318
0.500	0.600	-0.100	-0.200	0.700	0.630	-0.159	0.041
0.500	0.400	0.100	0.200	0.300	0.330	0.303	0.103

Prenormalized (proposed new functionality)

Diffuse Lum	Diff-Norm	Detail	%	User Value	Prenormalize	Detail	Total	%
0.549	0.471	0.078	0.143	0.500	0.167	0.083	0.583	0.143
0.800	0.900	-0.100	-0.125	0.500	-0.111	-0.056	0.444	-0.125
0.200	0.100	0.100	0.500	0.500	1.000	0.500	1.000	0.500
0.500	0.600	-0.100	-0.200	0.700	-0.167	-0.117	0.583	-0.200
0.500	0.400	0.100	0.200	0.300	0.250	0.075	0.375	0.200