Currently Blender has a small selection of blend textures, but if one of those presets doesn’t suit your purposes you have to make a gradient by hand in your image editor of choice. Depending on the purpose of the texture, getting the right gradient could be a very time-consuming hit-and-miss process. What I propose is a custom blend texture maker. The controls would be virtually identical to that of ramp shaders, allowing for more than one gradient in the same texture. Interpolation choices would be linear, quadratic, cubic, and none. Whattaya think?
[Edit]The effects of interpolation choices should be visible in the ramp editor as well, not just in the preview like ramp shaders are now.
Yes, those are not mappable textures though. They’re merely effects that depend on lighting and/or camera angle, and can’t be set to effect anything like reflectiveness, alpha, nor, specularity… If they could we wouldn’t need blend textures at all.
The blend texture is already good enough, I miss only one thing with texture mapping in general: the ability to rotate the textures by any angle. Scaling and moving of textures is alaready there.
