Hey there, everyone, sorry for making most of you wait forever for a reply… :o
I tried to reply over a week ago and BlenderArtists just made my (rather long) reply disappear into thin air. Pretty annoying.
Well, here’s my responses, for what it’s worth.
@axelredfield
Thanks for your feedback! I hope I’ll be able to release version 1.0 within the upcoming months.
@vklidu
Sorry it’s taken me so long to respond! Hopefully I’ll be able to answer your questions.
A) I’m using Tuqueque’s scene because it’s robust; my addon’s previews are pre-rendered (they don’t need to be generated on-the-fly), so the complicated-ness you’re referring to would only occur once (when the preview is rendered for the first time).
- Although having materials displayed simply as previews with names would probably be nice, in my opinion, Blender’s filebrowser is too limited for that. I feel that we’d need a brand new window type for that.
D) Sorry, but I wouldn’t know much about render scripts; most of the stuff I’ve done has been material-related. If you haven’t found the answer already, try asking on #blenderor #blendercoders, the folks there were real helpful to me when I started working on my addon.
I wish you luck in your quest to create a simple material preview!
@tmcintosh
Wow! Thanks for all your feedback!
I’m already written the code for downloading (preview) images, so downloading image textures should not be much harder. The simplistic materials were mainly in there for testing and (most, if not all) are going to be removed by the addon’s next alpha version.
@RickyBlender
My addon installs just the same as any other Blender addon.
Just download the online_mat_lib.py file, then open up Blender’s user preferences window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+U. Go to the Addons tab and then, in the footer, click the “Install new addon” button. Browse to the location of the downloaded addon and select it. It should now be installed. Enable it as you would any other addon. Switch to Cycles, then, in the properties window, go to the material options. You’ll now see the “Online Material Library” panel. Hope you enjoy it!
STATUS UPDATE:
Right now, I’m working on getting my addon to read XML for category/material information. It looks as if I’ll end up working with Python classes to create my own objects (programming objects, not Blender objects). I basically need more properties to hold all the material and category information (like the display name, link, creator, and rating).
I have completed Color Ramp node support; many of the materials from Meta-Androcto’s Cycles Mat-Lib roundup used this node, so it was keeping a lot of them from entering the library. That roadblock is out of the way, so expect to see more of those in the future!