I've got a lot of things on my plate right now (plugin development and other unrelated items) but as I've been communicating with various parties today regarding the current functionality of the plugin it would appear that a common theme is the ability to better manage and apply materials.
With that being said I've decided to develop my own material manager (within the global settings of the plugin). The user will be able to easily add, edit and delete materials. A material can be either a color or image based material. For an image based material the user will be able to specify the image (upload to library) and then specify the scaling (horz and vert). For a color based material the color can be set with a palette picker or RGB code. Additional customization (ie. transparency) can be accomplished via the standard SU material dialogs/tools.
This will allow the user to setup commonly used materials and have those populate the various drop downs in the draw and edit menus of the plugin.
Initially I wanted to go the SKM route but this has some serious backward compatibility problems so I've since abandoned that idea.
Currently the wall cladding drop down allows for the selection of any material currently defined within the model however this methodology is flawed in that it becomes too cluttered with materials that the user probably does not care to utilize for the wall geometry.
I may also incorporate some sort of flag system so that the user can specify which custom material will appear in which drop down field (ie. sheathing or cladding or both). I will need to give this some additional thought.
There will still exist some standard materials that are hard coded into the plugin and cannot be removed (ie. OSB, Plywood etc...) The idea being that some users may not want to spend the time defining a custom library and just want some standard materials right out of the box.
I think I've nailed down most of the details on how this will all go together but any suggestions or thoughts are always helpful.
With that being said I've decided to develop my own material manager (within the global settings of the plugin). The user will be able to easily add, edit and delete materials. A material can be either a color or image based material. For an image based material the user will be able to specify the image (upload to library) and then specify the scaling (horz and vert). For a color based material the color can be set with a palette picker or RGB code. Additional customization (ie. transparency) can be accomplished via the standard SU material dialogs/tools.
This will allow the user to setup commonly used materials and have those populate the various drop downs in the draw and edit menus of the plugin.
Initially I wanted to go the SKM route but this has some serious backward compatibility problems so I've since abandoned that idea.
Currently the wall cladding drop down allows for the selection of any material currently defined within the model however this methodology is flawed in that it becomes too cluttered with materials that the user probably does not care to utilize for the wall geometry.
I may also incorporate some sort of flag system so that the user can specify which custom material will appear in which drop down field (ie. sheathing or cladding or both). I will need to give this some additional thought.
There will still exist some standard materials that are hard coded into the plugin and cannot be removed (ie. OSB, Plywood etc...) The idea being that some users may not want to spend the time defining a custom library and just want some standard materials right out of the box.
I think I've nailed down most of the details on how this will all go together but any suggestions or thoughts are always helpful.