I am working on residential showcase which has various options for flooring / tiles / worktops etc and I have been able to achieve a full switch of kitchen materials using the overlapping geometry hidden in views approach which is a neat option (as long as I have hidden geometry underneath to cover the Lightmap blackholes!) lol took me a while to identify the work round for that!.
I would prefer to keep the material picking options for users in the scene overall as I think it is confusing to have a quazi material picker option as a change of view, plus it would mean the changes are maintained when moving to an alternate view and the view list is less cluttered.
Whilst I suppose I could technically unwrap the geometry and use something like substance painter etc to paint the geometry and then modify the texture to what i want and add as an alternative material, but for a full kitchen with units and worktops it is not practical and might suffer resolution across the geometry.
Are there any plans to add an extension which can change a ‘set’ of materials? So multiple sets inside the material picker?
Thanks in advance for any response you could provide.
I wonder what would be a workable user interface for such multi material switcher. Would for example having a single sphere in the scene per a single set of materials work well for you? For example, if you have three configuration options for a kitchen, you would add three spheres in the scenes, somewhere in the kitchen. When the user clicks the first sphere, the first set of materials is applied, the second applies the second, and so on.
By the way, having overleaping geometry is not necessary if you use the isolated shadow function, that allows to disable shadow castings for some objects.
Hi Jan, my thought when I posed the question was exactly that, with a sphere per set of materials. Which would work well.
However considering it more I wonder if it would offer more value to be a plane with an image texture we could specify / load.
The reasoning for this is that this way we could create a swatch image featuring all the materials in one, so the user can see what set they are choosing and would also allow us to name the set.
I appreciate it would probably be a small image, but may offer more clarity on which set is being chosen even if small. (Also appreciate an image might not be easily implemented by you guys!)
We will approach this in several steps, as there are several things that can be improved here.
As the first step that we aim to make available in the next release, we will allow views to be hidden from the menu and add a new extension that allows to switch to a view. This extension will have a ‘do not move camera’ setting. If this setting is selected, clicking on the extension will apply object visibility settings configured by the view, but won’t change the camera position.
@jan thank you that is great. So we would use the hide in view approach as before and then we would perhaps I guess then use a text anchor to describe the ‘view’ we want to go to?
Do you have any idea of the timeline for the next release this will come with?
You guys should give yourselves props for how quickly you respond and how supportive you are of your user base. Thank you!
@njay yes. We will also check how difficult it would be to allow to select any object in the scene as an anchor. This way it would be very flexible how anchors in the scene look like.
As for the release date, we hope for the end of the next week, as there are couple of bug fixes that we would like to push, but there are still a couple of items to finish.
@jan as @Kuba said mesh object as an anchor would be awesome, as could open up some interesting in scene interface options. Thx for indicating timing for update too, sounds great. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
