Quote - Back to happy thoughts. Maybe I should just keep my thoughts to myself ;).

Nah, I think you make pretty reasonable points Laurie.

Personally I'd hate to lose the advanced mat room, with its node format.

But... I'd be all for adding a layer on top of that. Something that is, of course, way more configurable than the current basic mat room. But that hides the node soup necessary to define say a base metal... lets you just tweak a set of parameters defined for that base metal (by the programmer who created the underlying base metal definition).

They could simply add a specific Parameter node to achieve this.

The new intermediate interface could automatically read the Parameter nodes in and build a nice GUI from them. There could be presets to these parameters too... that could be saved, redistributed, too... separate to the underlying node network, base shader.

So a base metal shader could perhaps be tweaked to be Iron, Steel... etc.

Although I'm thinking refined beyond that.

There'd be scope for skilled texture artists to fine tune... create new, refinements and redistribute.

The base shaders could also be sold, or given away, by those skilled enough to create them.

Although SM might also bundle some, as standard.

That's be my suggestion for the mat room.