[Bf-committers] Texture assignment workflow is confusing

[Roger Wickes]

great idea, and I think that's where macros come in. 
I am working on a mod to your mockup that flows left to right, 
starting with geometry and ending with a (moral equivalent of composite output)
feed to all users of that nodetree; I think that would blend our metaphors. 

A texture stack can always be represented as a nodetree. Even a macro to convert
from stack to nodetree would be nice

To re-use a texture/texture stack with another material, user would just 
click the tex-swatch for the appropriate texswatch, 
choose/select that texture nodetree from the header list
and that texswatch would be added onto the texOuput node. 
I will provide a mockup of the workflow this week. 

Regarding "I just want to add a UV Image" -  that could run a macro that makes
a UV geometry -> image input -> material diffuse output texture nodetree,
and sets the material shadeless, changes the Scale of the object to match the 
Image resolution, sets alpha 0 and uses the image's alpha, does the Texmode 
thang so that we see it in 3D view, etc. This is a long-standing confuser for users.
The only step left is to actually select the image...so we just need some 
way (i know, not a popup) to tell the user the remaining steps. 

Other macros based on mat/tex questions I answer regularly:

I want to add a decal <- Object map to
I want to rough up the surface <- Nor map to
I want it to look like glass <- Material library integration?

Some of these presets/macros have options, like for the glass do you want
to use ztrans or raytrans; for that image example above I can see options
to scale or not the object itself to match resolution. 

 --Roger





________________________________
From: Doug Ollivier <doug at flipdesign.co.nz>
To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Wed, May 12, 2010 7:25:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Texture assignment workflow is confusing

Don't worry I understood it. it's a mock-up after-all which means a 
certain amount of imagination is always required.

Nice work on the mock-up, and totally agree with that being the end goal 
that a new system would enable.

I think there needs to be another more simple interface closer to the 
non-nodes interface for people who "just want to plug an image in"  and 
that is what i am interested in exploring since i think that is the more 
unique challenge.  Nodes are quite well understood but are a big 
learning curve,  great for complex tasks like colour correction between 
sockets as you have shown, but completely over complex for simple tasks 
that involve 1 connection.

Cheers,

Doug