[Bf-taskforce25] Texture workflow update

[Wahooney]

I like these, +1.

The texture influence is especially good, any opportunity to save some 
space and add functionality is a good thing.

I was wondering, however, if it would be an idea to have a Colour/Blend 
Type property per material element (diffuse, emit, ambient, etc.), 
within reason of course... It's no good giving a normal colour, for 
instance. This will allow a single texture to do a lot in a material, 
the colours can also have a checkbox next to them indicating whether 
they inherit from a main colour or if they override it.

Keith.

William Reynish wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> The material/texturing workflow is already being tweaked a bit for  
> 2.5. Previously this has been one of Blender's weak areas, so a little  
> optimizing will do good.
>
> The first thing I'd like to mention, and this is something that has  
> already been done, is that all texture settings have been moved  
> together, inside the textures tab. This means far less jumping back  
> and forth between material and texture panels while tweaking textures.  
> Of course at the moment this also means you can't see a preview of the  
> final material while tweaking influence settings, but this can be  
> overcome by improving the texture preview widget like so:
>
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/texturepreview.png
>
> The second thing that could be improved is how the texture influence  
> controls work. Currently some influence settings have a slider that  
> controls the intensity of that parameter; others share a single  
> slider. This is both confusing and inflexible. Though if all those  
> settings had its own slider the influence panel would quickly get  
> rather large. A solution to this problem is to simply remove all the  
> checkboxes, and only have sliders, like so:
>
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/textureinfluence.png
>
> This also solves the issue of the old tripple-state checkboxes for  
> inverting values. These sliders can simply have negative values for  
> inverting the effect.
>
> Using sliders only also means there is space to add more influence  
> parameters in the future, to be able to influence, say, SSS settings.
>
> Lastly I've been thinking about ways to make the texture tab more  
> clear in what it relates to. Textures can affect both world, lamp and  
> materials, and you can get to each texture area by cycling through the  
> texture display buttons to go from world to lamp to materials.
>
> This can really be cleared up so that we actually have three texture  
> tabs, one for each ID type that uses them. Instead of polluting the  
> main header buttons with too many tabs though, they can be tucked away  
> inside each ID tab, like so:
>
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/texturetabs.png
>
> These sub-tabs can nicely be used for other things too, like a game  
> tab with two sub-categories for controlling scene-specific game  
> settings and object-specific game settings.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -William
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