Doubt about Default Material

[oort]

Micheus,
I gave it a try. I see that the change is under Material Properties. I was expecting to see the new settings under Edit > Preferences > General Tab > Materials. Would it be better to have it there and Change "Materials" to "Default Material" and list "Diffuse", "Ambient", "Specular", etc. under that??? Having a Restore or Reset button is a good idea.

Edit: I see that creating a "New Material" and changing settings and then "Save" changes the default color as well. So maybe "Materials" should be removed from under Edit > Preferences > General Tab. The "Save" button could then be renamed to "Set Default". That way if you came up with a new color and decided you wanted that to be the default you could do it without having to go to Edit > Preferences. Just thinking out loud. Probably best not to be able to set the default color in two places... or maybe it is ok... not sure???

Are you learning enough about materials to add the ability to export, import and share them????

Thanks,
oort

[MikeJ]

I agree that having the ability to change the default material settings in two places is probably not the best idea. Upon thinking about it for a few minutes I think it would be best to take oort's first idea and include the ability to change all of the default materials parameters in the preferences. You could then "gray out" the appropriate boxes in the material properties window when you right-click the default material, just as the diffuse color is currently grayed out in the default texture now.

Then again, I suppose you don't need to gray out any of the settings windows in the material properties window you get when you right-click. It would be just that the settings are temporary. Permanent settings would have to be made in the preferences.

Of course, all of this is just thinking out loud and rambling without any idea of how difficult it would be to code any of these changes. I think it will be up to Micheus to decide what is possible and what is not.

[micheus]

I was expecting to see the new settings under Edit > Preferences > General Tab > Materials.

oort, the basic idea is keep the things simple.
The default material will not be changed a lot, so thinking about preview the changes the best/easy way to do that is in the material editor. Also, those buttons being shown for every material is temporary - they will be available only for the defaut material.

Are you learning enough about materials to add the ability to export, import and share them????

you can open a new thread for expose your ideas about that. Let see what happens after.

MikeJ, as I told, the way it's getting done is the most simple and easy to be set. The diffuse color in the preferences will be there for the restore option - still hard coded. The three color schemas present in Wings use/set it and something we need to think is about compatibility.

[oort]

Micheus,
I did not think about the diffuse under Preferences being associated with the three color schemes...

Keeping things simple sounds good to me. Having the buttons only in the default material will be good. As you saw in my previous post, my mind was divided on having it in both places...

I will not start a thread on exporting and importing materials since I am sure you are busy with other things and using merge to bring in materials works. Although merge needs improving... It is mentioned in this thread on material library... Material Library

Thanks,
oort

[micheus]

About a new default* material that has being created every time we load a project that was using a different settings for default material...
There is a note about that in the source code by bjorn:

%%
%% Object modes were removed after the 1.1.7 release and
%% replaced with information about vertex colors in the
%% materials. At the same time the 'default' material was
%% changed to show vertex colors for the faces it was applied
%% to.
%%
%% Left alone, there would be two annoyances when loading
%% old models:
%%
%% 1. Vertex colors would not be shown.
%%
%% 2. Since the 'default' materials do not match, the 'default'
%% material in the file will be renamed to 'default2' (or
%% something similar) and there would be a new 'default'
%% material.
%%
%% We will avoid both those annoyances by changing the 'default'
%% material in the file so that it is more likely to match
%% current 'default' material. We will only do this change if
%% the file contains an implicit object mode for some object,
%% i.e. was saved by 1.1.7 or earlier.
%%

So, in order to not mess up the things I'm checking if the only difference between the default being loaded and the current one is related to the OpenGL parameters (that group of fields on the Material Editor dialog).

I considering this one as a final version, so please, try it too. Download at the same link above.

[oort]

Micheus,
I have tested the new version and it seems to be working perfectly. Great work as always.

Thanks,
oort

[MikeJ]

Have been away from the office all day so haven't had a chance to do much testing until now. I downloaded the new version of the .beam file and installed it. The "default2" issue seems to have gone away! Excellent work Micheus!

After a little further testing I have discovered that the Restore button doesn't seem to function for me. Or perhaps I don't understand its operation. When I change the default material and click the Save button and then the Okay button the default material is changed to the new material. However, when I then click the Restore button and then the Okay button the default material is not changed. This leads me to believe that the Restore button only moves the sliders in the material properties window and doesn't actually restore those settings to Wings3D. You must additionally have to click the Save button after the Restore button to do that. This is not how I would expect it to operate.

My expectation is that the Restore button would do both things. It would restore the settings in the material properties panel and then automatically save them to Wings3D. That is how I would expect a restore function to work. What is your expectation oort? Perhaps this is just me being weird.

Nonetheless, I am very happy with its current operation as is! It's just a matter of getting used to having to click the Save button after the Restore button which is a small matter.

Thanks again so much Micheus!

[micheus]

My expectation is that the Restore button would do both things. It would restore the settings in the material properties panel and then automatically save them to Wings3D.

You are absolutely right.
I forgot to add one line of code to save the change, but it's fixed now.

Now it needs to be accepted by the main devs. in order to be available in a future new version. (pull request #67)
Thanks for your help guys.

[MikeJ]

I can confirm that the Restore button now does both things at once. Nice!

However, I'm still getting a "default2" issue, though it is a bit of a limited one. Is seems when ever you make a change to the default material (using either the Save or Restore button) and then hit the Okay button to apply that change to at least one object in the scene that has the default material on it, the next time you open Wings3D you get a new default material and a "default2" material which has the same exact settings.

So again, open Wings3D and create a simple scene with a single object in it. That object will obviously have the currently-defined default material. Make a change to the properties of that default material and click Save and then Okay. Save the file and close Wings3D. Reopen Wings3D, reload the file. If your system does the same thing mine does you will have a default material and a "default2" material with identical settings.

[micheus]

MickJ, I'm not sure I can/should fix that.
What I noticed here is that it happens if editing the default material we expand one of those plugins groups (POV-ray, Kerkythea, ...) this information will be stored in the default material for that saved scene (file). When we start Wings again or just create a new scene after that Wings will recreate the default material where those plugins settings are empty.