handle disabling normal and gloss and diffuse differently for smart materials

[shaderbytes]

Ive used 3d coat several times and watched plenty of tutorial videos thanks. I dont need any tutorial video links in the answers.

 

The problem here is the butttons used to enable/disable diffuse/gloss/normal are not even visible when a smart material is chosen. This is a terrible ui experience. It is so easy to forget their state .. out of sight out of mind , and have been caught by this a few times already and need to redo work because of that. You have to close smart materials and click brush tools to see these option again, then make the edit to them and then go back to smart material. I understand you want to use some global options to pertain to all operations but then it should be visible at all times., or you need to handle this differently for smart materials. Ideally a smart material should set these as well as their values when clicking the smart material.

This will make jumping from smart material to smart material a breeze as well as using them. If you need to enable/disable any channel or change its influence it should be done in the smart material editor. These changes will again change the global states as needed. you can edit the name and save the material if you like. While you may think this is bad because you will need a material for each setting, this is not a problem with smart material because they are tweaked already by eye and there is not much variation required, and besides you can open the editor tweak the values and not save if so desired. 

 

but yeah i have a huge issue with those current buttons controlling smart materials but are not even visible during this process.

 

thanks 

 

 

[Carlosan]

Hi

Sorry but I do not understand your request well.

In this image I have smart material selected and the buttons used to enable/disable diffuse/gloss/normal are visible when a smart material is chosen.

Could you add an image of this problem?

Thank you

 

[Ballistic_Tension]

If by chance you have the Paint Bucket TOOL selected the   3  spheres   blue ,green  , black   move too the far left  .

[shaderbytes]

ah yes it could be during use of the paint bucket... which is how i use smart materials most of the time  i have switched to brush set some of those spheres and then set to bucket for some smart materials and because they are not visible( moved to the far left) have forgotten about them.

 

Anyway even if this is fixed i wish they didnt override smart material values ( or move!). I know it is nice to have full control of these channels in a global sense but it should have some prompt or something when you switch to a smart material and one of these channels is disabled.. i guess with time you wont make these mistakes and it is not a major issue to others but it has caught me out quite a few times already. And based on seeing some other posts im not they only one. 

 

So not the best for 3dcoat beginners and people like me who have only painted a few objects. Perhaps a beggnners mode with prompts and warnings like these by default which can be tun off in the preferences? This means after you have taken the effort to disable the prompt you accept full responsibility , outside of that you get reminded in some way..