[Bf-cycles] Some suggestions for nodes' interface revision in PBR times

[Adriano Oliveira]

Dears,

I would like to suggest some reviews for IMAGE TEXTURE and NORMAL MAP nodes
interface to help with PBR workflow.

1. COLOR SPACE. Today we need to open a drop down menu and pick color
(sRGB) / non-color (linear). In a PBR workflow, most of textures should be
linear (roughness, metallic, normal map, ambient occlusion etc) and only
albedo/base color is usually a sRGB bitmap. Therefore, we need to perform 2
clicks over the majority of textures we import... A better approach would
be to have just a check box for "[  ] sRGB", like in Unreal. If it is
checked (default), color space is gamma corrected, if it is not, it is
linear. Believe me, when you have a scene with dozens of PBR material, this
is a huge time saving.

2. RGB output slots [not as needed as above]. Now we have COLOR and ALPHA
outputs from a Image Texture node. In PBR workflows it is very common to
merge gray scale maps into the four channels of a RGBA texture. It would be
nice to have as outputs COLOR, R, G, B and ALPHA, like in Unreal. [This can
be done via Separate RGB, of course].

3. INVERT GREEN / Y in NORMAL MAP node. There are two standards today for
normal maps: OpenGL (Blender) and DirectX. Most systems offers a check box
to invert direction of the Y channel. Bake in Blender does, so it seems
reasonable to have it in NM node also.

Best regards,

*Adriano A. Oliveira*
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