My suggestions

[neo0.]

Speaking of ui, sss seems to have disappeared from the ui, requiring us to blend our material. Any chance it could be added.. No way to save materials either. I had to take a pic of the config with my phone.. When you add a glossy transparent material it complains that there is no medium and it makes you add it manually.. Forgive me but i dont understand why indigo doesnt just do this by itself?

[thesquirell]

Using it from the host application, C4D in my case, everything regarding mediums is added automatically. As far as the Indigo's interface go, I actually like how it makes you add your medium, so you get invited to dive deeper, and feel how transparent materials work, and even learn about real life, in some way. It makes you care about the medium, from the start to the end.

Scattering is present, from both the exporter and Indigo's GUI, don't really know what are you talking about, so could you please explain that more to us? It is possible to save your material from the Indigo itself, you just go to Property Editor-File-Save material. Now, as far as the exporters go, I've used only Cindigo, so can't tell anything about the others, but I know that Cindigo has "export material" option which I never used, and whose function is unknown to me!

Phase function for scattering is missing it's GUI inside Indigo, would love to see that implemented.

[neo0.]

Just found the save material option! Hooray! Kind of easy to miss and i dont get why its the only option under file. Just my opinion!

EDIT : A dup material option would be very helpful too! Really hoping for a material preview as well! Never been too sure of why when you load a map the texture editor changes it? I mean, before i have even made any changes it already looks completely different than the map i loaded in.. If someone could clarify this it would be awesome.

[Oscar J]

Just found the save material option! Hooray! Kind of easy to miss and i dont get why its the only option under file. Just my opinion!

EDIT : A dup material option would be very helpful too! Really hoping for a material preview as well! Never been too sure of why when you load a map the texture editor changes it? I mean, before i have even made any changes it already looks completely different than the map i loaded in.. If someone could clarify this it would be awesome.

I have already showed you that they have indeed implemented material previews in 4.0.

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... =7&t=13500

[FakeShamus]

A dup material option would be very helpful too!...
Never been too sure of why when you load a map the texture editor changes it? I mean, before i have even made any changes it already looks completely different than the map i loaded in.. If someone could clarify this it would be awesome.

I would second the request for a duplicate material option. I have saved out a material and then re-imported it to a scene many times just so I can do a variation on it. that would save some steps. I also think the "file>save material" menu is a bit weird. the wording or context seems a little off, but not hard to figure out.

also, on automatic adding of medium for specular and glossy materials I can see both perspectives. the way it is now you do have to think about it and it indicates you have to set parameters for the medium. but an error message whenever you add one of those materials is a bit weird. If I recall correctly, the old material creator did add the medium automatically (this was a looong time ago though).

and, as far as textures changing when loaded, is it just because of the default a,b,c settings for certain channels? bump and displacement, for example, would not work properly in most realistic situations if the B were set to 1.0 (=1 meter displacement). your texture might look right on screen with 1.0 but it's not going to behave right in the material. but maybe I'm misinterpreting your problem.

[neo0.]

The way its set up its just a little wierd, how as soon as you create a material, it throws up an error before you even have time to do anything. Maybe it could be an option?

Also, what about automatic render mode suggestions? Could be an option to and if enabled, indigo would analyze your scene and pick a good render mode? Sure, if you have the technical knowlege this isnt a big deal for those of us who are less.. well shall we say technical, this can be kind of confusing sometimes.


Another idea, but perhaps made unnesesary, by the awesome looking material previews (thanks alot guys!) is sort of a diagram that illustrates how light is interacting with the material. It would show the angles of incidence, how thin coatings, etc are affecting our materials, etc. Could be helpful for fixing problems with materials and for those of us who are cough cough less technical. Something like this would obviously be lower in priority than other things but i think it would be a neat idea imo.

Awhile back, the idea was brought up of a "selective" render mode that concentrated on the noisiest parts of the image, or perhaps could even let you choose the rendering priority of parts of your scene, sort of like how you can choose the priority of files while torrenting. I think its an interesting idea.

[thesquirell]

I really like those suggestions, a lot! I think they could work in something like a dedicated material editor, like a material studio with it's own analyzers in it, or it could be implemented inside this upcoming material preview, for now. This new material studio could even have it's own node editing material creation, for better overview of blending, and other effects. It could also support ISL through nodes, where we could place an entire ISL function with a single node, connect outputs, etc. Regarding mediums, instead of error, it could write something more friendly, like "Would you like to add medium now" or something similar. Also, that priority region would be swell! I like it neo0, a lot.

[neo0.]

I really like those suggestions, a lot! I think they could work in something like a dedicated material editor, like a material studio with it's own analyzers in it, or it could be implemented inside this upcoming material preview, for now. This new material studio could even have it's own node editing material creation, for better overview of blending, and other effects. It could also support ISL through nodes, where we could place an entire ISL function with a single node, connect outputs, etc. Regarding mediums, instead of error, it could write something more friendly, like "Would you like to add medium now" or something similar. Also, that priority region would be swell! I like it neo0, a lot.

The way i see it there are several ways of doing this
1. Indigo could divide your scene into quadrants, say 16 parts, you hold down a hotkey or something and it brings up an overlay. Click one and bam indigo diverts more power to that region.
2. Or you could click on objects in the open gl preview to add them to the "high priority list", where their relative priority could be adjusted. Personally i think this one is the best.
3. The last one is that indigo automatically would "know" which parts of your scene are the noisiest and would devote more power to them. This is tricky i think but there would be something to be said for the convenience.


What about selective rendering? So, for example, i want to adjust the material one one item but i dont want to have to re render my whole scene. Would be cool if i could just tell indigo to only render certain objects. As i see, it you would just do it like hiding layers in photoshop. Clicking a little visibility icon would tell indigo whether to render it or not.

A slider for adjusting transparency? Thing is that as i start to move away from just being a hobbyist (i enjoy indigo a ton dont get me wrong ) I want to the UI to become more production friendly. I want to see indigo being used by more agencies.

[neo0.]

Another way to handle the render priority might be to give the user the ability to adjust the focus on shadows/highlights. I find that my shadows often take a little longer to clear up than my brighter areas. This could be very simple. As you would just need a simple slider that's set up much like a histogram is. Nudging it to the left would make indigo focus more on highlights and to the left would mean more priority for shadows.

Of course, we might want to adjust the black/white clipping here and things might get a little more complicated. This could be done with some sort of curves and then people could share their render priority configs

I would love to be able to click and drag in the inputs to change them too a la lightroom. I think blending materials could be much faster too. When we get the material previews, we could maybe blend materials by dragging one on top of the other or perhaps selecting the materials and clicking a "blend" button. Would make it much easier to create complex materials

[thesquirell]

Great thinking, finding those ideas worth of trying out, if not for a full release then just as a small experiment. As for the blending, fuse has done amazing job for Cindigo, where you have a blend channel for every material, so there is no need for creating a separate blend material, it can all be collapsed to one, which gives you a shorter overview and cleaner material set! It's fun to imagine all these things, but that region render priority is something that really tickles me..

[neo0.]

Yeah, in addition to the render regions heres another way that i think would be cool. Since im a photographr and i deal with this stuff all the time and indigo is a little like a camera we could have something like this. Would basically like creating a mask where indigo focuses more on those areas (ratio between "normal" and high priority would be adjustable.) You could press hot key or something to reveal the selected areas You would be selecting the higher priority regions by tonal range essentially.

[neo0.]

Might have already mentioned this but the word "scale" appears twice in the texture editor.

What about an option to fix floating objects. Shouldnt be too difficulty to "guess" when an object is supposed to be sitting on top of another. Sure, getting this right in app is great but there will always be that 10% of the time when you forget to do it i wish it was as easy as just clicking a button. Some warnings (or boundarys) for the displacement would be nice. Like to avoid having to play trial and error. So the upper bound would not let you increase the value so high that your geometry get messed up. I dont know i feel like this might help to speed up your workflow. Just an idea.

[neo0.]

Some more ideas that i was thinking about last night..

1 - Was dwelling on the issue of color and i thought about a color system that mimicked the way paints are mixed. What about an additive color system of some sort? You know where add more red or green or something. Are there plans to revamp the color picker?

2 - What about dropping the cpu usage ever so slightly and seamlessly when we make changes? Indigo can stutter sometime when makeing adjust ments.

3- What about render scheduling/queing? So you can tell indgo to render your scene with these settings then after its competed say 500 spp then it will switch to different settings. Completely hands off an automated.

4 - What about an auto mapping adjust feature where an overlay is displayed in the texture editor and you can click and drag to adjust? It could also adjust for perspective differences.