Hi all, I am interested in supplying Blender with 100’s of Materials in a Library format, accessible from within Blender.
I cannot do this alone, however I feel with some clever coding this may be possible.
The Concept: (Separated into tasks)
1/ To have as a separate download from Blender a fully sorted Material Library similar to other 3d programs.
2/ To use only Procedural Materials/Textures/Nodes so as to keep file size low.
3/ The materials could be kept in named scenes for calling
4/ The download would consist of 3 files,
a/ A folder called Materials to reside in .blender.
b/ Inside ‘Materials’ a .blend containing the library.
c/ A Script to reside in .blender/scripts. To open/browse the library.
So, once decided what the category’s should be, & building the Library,
that should be the easy part, I can organize, manage building the library myself with some feedback.
The script would be somewhat more difficult.
The Script:
I would see the script to do several things. How I see it working:
1/ To run, probably because it is external, from the scripts window, scripts/materials.
(this could be changed later, it may be that it could be coded to be more accessible from the materials dialogs)
2/ An Interface to open the materials by category in thumbnail preview. Click on the category, opens the thumbnails previews, click on the thumbnail to transfer either to a material preview within the script interface, (preferable but probably not needed) , or press a button to make the selected material ‘Local/Real’ so it is appended to the Materials window proper.
One simpler solution would be to have the script to Append all the Materials to the Materials dialogs, and to recode the Materials (add new) window to open up in Thumbnail view for easy browsing. The problem with this is that it could increase file sizes. It would be good to have the Materials window show Thumbnail previews anyway, but I feel the first option may be better for a large sorted library.
So I am prepared to gather, make, seek permissions for all the materials & thumbnails needed ( if thumbnails are needed, better to have the ability for the interface to access the materials information directly & preview in Thumbnail view).
Once up & running Materials could be added/removed based on user feedback for new releases of Blender.
I would need someone to write the code to make the interface & call on the correct functions to make it work.
Any takers on helping with the code/interface aspect of this?
Thanks, Brendon.