[REQ] Indigo imaterial and .imt material format.

[matsta]

hey guys

as the irc few of you will know psor and wytraven have been helping me put together a material editor and creator that is seperate from and application. i came up with the name "imaterial" (corny i know ) and have done a rough mock up of what i think it could look like. this app will alow you to modeify and create materials in a style similar to fryrender's material creator. the created materials could be saved as single file's (.imt's perhaps), this would make for easier sharing online and the creation of personal databases as well as an easier to use online database.

i know this may entail alot of work but in my opinion, a good material editor is what indigo is lacking. anyone interested in helping to code this app please just shout. psor has already volunteered some time towards it and, although he may not have lots of time, im sure wyt will help out a bit too

not sure what your views on this are ono but please give input

greetz
mat

[arneoog]

I really like the design, so far
Would be really cool if we could get it looking like that

Good luck to everyone who's gonna make this sweet indigo addition

Cheers!

[Marcofly]

very good, matsta..

[matsta]

thanks alot macrofly

[joegiampaoli]

Aww man! That looks great!
I hope you can make it system wide....

[dougal2]

cool idea. if you guys need a SVN repository to work from, I can provide.

[Kram1032]

looks great, so far
sometimes, the contrast between text and background might still be quite low, but I guess, it's fine, now

[matsta]

thanks mark if people have constant issues with the colour scheme i will take requests. but only if u provide swatches etc. ;P

greetz
mat

[Kram1032]

no, it's your app

The contrast is fine, now

[manitwo]

concerning the contrast i would prefer it that way:

[suvakas]

imt format? Another file extension?
I'd say no. There already is igm for materials.

Interface looks nice

[edit]
Oh, if you mean imt as an internal format for this editor, then yeah..I don't care about that...could be as well *.usa

[matsta]

suvakus would u be able to help us with programming.. not sure if u program but i seem to recall that you do

greetz
mat

[alex22]

In what language would you want to programm it?

[Kosmokrator]

UI looks awesome.....+1 for me....
look forward to realize this great idea

[WytRaven]

Suvakas: The reasoning for a new file format, whether Matsta realizes it or not, is for material project files not for indigo material files. This application would export .igm's for use in renders but would store it's own project files in it's own format.

Consider the possibilty of expanding the base idea to include procedural nodes baked at export time. One would want to keep the project itself in it's procedural state for storage and sharing etc and indigo's own .igm (which is just an indigo material definition in an external xml file) does not provide for this sort of functionality.

If you then say that is too much and this should just be a straight indigo material editor then I would say scrap the project now as it would simply be reproducing the functionality of exporters which is entirely pointless. Hence the introduction of a node based editing system, which for indigo materials at thier base level is a bit over kill with the only advantage being logical layout of blend materials. Add in procdural texture nodes and associated compositing nodes and this suddenly becomes a much more interesting prospect.

For this project to be worth anything it must allow more power to create surfaces for our objects than indigo+exporter currently can.