[Bf-taskforce25] Texture workflow update

[William Reynish]

On 17 Jun, 2009, at 8:03 PM, GSR wrote:

> Hi,
> william at reynish.com (2009-06-16 at 2032.39 +0200):
>> 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.
>
> The price to pay is that to see individual effects for tuning, you
> have to note down all the values you do not want to see, input zero
> and when done, set them back to the old values you manually stored.
> Using many texture channels could workaround that issue (if the
> texture limit stops being so low), but cause having to sync many other
> settings. Matt idea solves it.

Agreed, Matt's amendment is better. +1

>
>> 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.
> [...]
>> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/texturetabs.png
>
> What about textures for brushes? Or displace modifier? Or being part
> of a node tree? Or <fill blank>? Current situation is bad, having to
> add materials and disabling them because if totally unlinked from the
> material, editability is lost. So solving those cases for once would
> be nice.

Yes, I admit not having thought about using textures in those cases.  
But the problem is actually a little deeper than that, because Blender  
already doesn't support this. If a texture isn't bound to a material,  
lamp or world block it gets garbage collected, and there is no easy  
way to even create a texture without binding it to a material, lamp or  
world.

These 'free' textures need a better solution, at least until we have a  
more comprehensive new unified node system ;)

Cheers,

-William