Wishlist & Interface Updates

[Garret Diduck]

Most of these items are interface updates & wishes. Some wishes have been asked about for a long time, but they're worth repeating.

1.  Break out the Lighting, Material, etc. panels so we can expand them larger on screen. Mainly the material panel becomes very cramped even when you have a modest amount of materials, layers or both. 
2. When you copy a material to make a new one, it retains the original material name when you save it to a file. It needs to be named the new material name.
3. Selecting a masking color in texture maps is a blind process as you can't 'pick' the color you want to mask. Getting 'close' by setting the RGB value is a workaround, but not accurate.
4. Drag and drop materials into the nXt material palette from explorer. It appears you can do this (at least there is no error message), but the material never shows in the list even after a refresh.
5. The ability to sort by Material in the material panel (next to the layer list). This was possible in AR3/4 but has gone away.
6. Can we have the properties dialog box come up after attaching a decal (a la AR3/4)? Currently, it is a two step repeat process to edit the decal you just applied.
7. When changing the RGB values of a material in the material editor, it would be nice to be able to tab in the R to G to B sequence. The current sequence is G-R-B. For that matter, it would be nice if ALL of the dialog boxes followed a top to bottom order instead of the complete randomness there is now.
8. As with the materials, it would be nice to be able to sort lights by Name, pattern, channel, etc.
9. Can we add a lighting channel column to the Light tab (where the light name list appears) so we can see what channel is assigned to each light? and add it to the sort list (see above)
10. RPC's & Render Farm issue (not rendering). Well documented, so let's get it fixed!
11. UV mapping (still asking for it)
12. A re-work/re-think on the plant editor and lack of plant library. It's a shame to have this potential without it being utilized anymore. This was a big selling point for me when I first purchased AR many years ago. With the lack of a distributed database and RPC's not rendering on the the farm, exterior renderings with vegetation are more time consuming now than they were in the AR3/4 days. Refer to Plant Editor/Database/Design by Land Designs product for Rhino/Flamingo http://www.lands-design.com/features/plant-database/ http://www.lands-design.com/features/render/ for some ideas.
  - Forest generator
  - Parterre
  - Plant Editor 
  - Plant Database
13. Subsurface scattering & Fog only work in Path Tracer. Can we get these working in the Hybrid engine as well? 
14. Can the material layer list match autocad layer list when filtered or frozen/hidden? Seems like this was possible in AR3/4.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Seconded! 

[akinlolu olugboji]

Would also like to add that I will welcome development along the line of animations, 3d RPC's and animating objects etc

[akinlolu olugboji]

When is development tending towards here!

[Albert D Hart]

This is a very good list and we are excited about working on some of these items.

Roy does all the work on the renderer itself, but several of these items are User Interface items which Rich Hart and I can go to work on. Rich is just finishing a couple of projects - one to make it easier to position and use background image and HDRi skies - and one to import some pre-defined lighting fixtures from an on-line library. As soon as we can get these released we will start on some of the items on this list.

[Garret Diduck]

We're coming up on a year since these suggestions were made. Any word on their progress? If I had to prioritize, I'd take the interface items first. That would save me the most time on a day to day basis.

[Zdravko Todorovic]

Je crains que cela prendra encore un an pour faire quelque chose

[Miguel Tano Adanes]

I would add a sort of camera match tool in order to fit the model into a given background, not as it is now that we have to stretch the background to fit the model window.

[Garret Diduck]

15. Would like to be able to choose the render engine type for the material preview. Each engine type produces a different look for a particular material. It would be nice to get an idea of what a material is going to look like for a particular engine while we're putting it together.

[Peter Milner]

A very useful feature I found in 3DS was the ability to add a small radius to edges during the render process rather than adding them to the model. Though, I feel this may be an AutoCAD limitation rather than Accurender.

[J. Brown]

WOW! I was just opeing IE to send a "please add a way to organize the materials better by clicking on the header Material"... because this is SO important when you have 100 layers with diffrent matterials and your client says "can you make that red"... and you miss a few.

 

[Miguel Tano Adanes]

I recently discover this program which has an interesting and very simple and precise match view tool. Check the link and scroll down to Match Viev video demonstration. Would be possible to have something similar in nXt?

[Maciej]

I would be greate to create a plant (tree) with two (or more...) leaf types, I mean different png or jpg bitmap files, so the tree look more realistic as the 1st plan object...

Any chance for that in the future?  :-)

Regards,

Maciej