Material library

[micheus]

This discussion has started in Yafaray plugin theread with the subject "default material details for the renders":

Because of my experiments I'm thinking about to add a [Set default] button for each render session. The option that we have on Plugins Preferences dialog doesn't help us much - it's important define the material details too.

Yes it would be good to be able to set more than just the shader type. The default values worked for the simple test renders I was doing but for more control one should probably be able to set other defaults. This could get messy since some shaders have only a few settings and others have lots of settings. Compare "light material" shader to "Translucent SSS" shader.

This could get messy since some shaders have only a few settings and others have lots of settings.

The idea is to use a structure data to store each render settings. This way, we replace everything for that render (we can have only one default material per render app)

So you want to move the "Default Shader" setting under Edit > Plugin Preferences > Yafaray to the Material Properties dialog. Why not simply add a "Default Shader" setting under Edit > Plugin Preferences > Kerkythea??? Once set, I don't think one would change it very often.

I'm not thinking only about Kerkythea.
I think that we should to store a default material with the whole material parameters - not only the shader type in some place.

Lights should not be managed and by setting the properties once you probably will not need to do it again - as you told - but it comes in handy when using that "Vertex to material" option for creating many materials.

But while I was writing this post, I thought about to change that button I named [Set to default] to [Save to library]. This way we would create something like a Material Library for Wings3d.

What "Wingers" think about that?