General Feedback
Overall I love ShaderMap 2. Lots of great features. It works very well. The ability to paint into the normal maps is just so much fun and great for getting things done quickly.
In the spirit of helping to improve the tool, here is some general feedback on using the app:
1. I couldn't find any hotkeys for changing brush size or opacity. These would be a big help in painting on normal maps.
2. Zooming in and out of a window seems to require a mouse with a scroll wheel. That's great for most but if I am painting on a normal map I am using a Wacom tablet. There should be a way to zoom in and out using standard button clicks. The Wacom stylus can do a Left Mouse, Middle Mouse, and Right Mouse click just like a mouse. But it doesn't have a scroll wheel.
3. Would love to have some size and rotation variation to the normal map brushes.
4. I can't get the imported brushes (models or bitmaps ) to work reliably. I am using the new OBJ importer posted on another thread. Most of my OBJ models import as flat gray with no normals displayed and often have missing polygons. Bitmap brushes sometimes work and sometimes don't. Sometimes they just make a red splotch when I paint. The OBJs I am using came from max 2012 and max 2013. Older OBJs do seem to work. So maybe the issue is a subtle change of format in newer versions of max. I'll let you know if I find out more.
In the spirit of helping to improve the tool, here is some general feedback on using the app:
1. I couldn't find any hotkeys for changing brush size or opacity. These would be a big help in painting on normal maps.
2. Zooming in and out of a window seems to require a mouse with a scroll wheel. That's great for most but if I am painting on a normal map I am using a Wacom tablet. There should be a way to zoom in and out using standard button clicks. The Wacom stylus can do a Left Mouse, Middle Mouse, and Right Mouse click just like a mouse. But it doesn't have a scroll wheel.
3. Would love to have some size and rotation variation to the normal map brushes.
4. I can't get the imported brushes (models or bitmaps ) to work reliably. I am using the new OBJ importer posted on another thread. Most of my OBJ models import as flat gray with no normals displayed and often have missing polygons. Bitmap brushes sometimes work and sometimes don't. Sometimes they just make a red splotch when I paint. The OBJs I am using came from max 2012 and max 2013. Older OBJs do seem to work. So maybe the issue is a subtle change of format in newer versions of max. I'll let you know if I find out more.
Comments
Great feedback. Thanks.
Will try to get some OBJs from 2012/2013 and see what the problem is.
-- EDIT
I was just able to replicate the bug when painting with a normal map brush. That's good news.. it will be fixed in the next service release.
Opacity 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 0 (1 = 10%, 2 = 20%, etc...)
Brush Size [ and ] ("[" = smaller, "]" = larger)
One other thought. You've got a nice help file that gets installed with the app but I didn't even know it was there until I started digging around in the app folder looking for custom brush examples. If there was a link to the help file from the application, I never found it. There should be an obvious way to access help from within the app. I was able to figure out 90% of everything just by playing around and using the tooltips but some things, like the material editor, took a while to find this way.
Thanks for the offer of OBJ samples but I do have access to a Max 2012 install, so I'll be using that next week to look for variations in the OBJ file format.
I second this suggestion, along with maybe constraint like shift to paint horizontal/vertical.
Also, Kudos for all you have done with version 2, I loved version 1, and with the unlimited versions of produceable maps in version 2, I can see workflow increasing by major bounds.
The only thing I'd like to see at the moment is for SM2 to recognize that the input file has changed, reload it and update the resultant maps.
Perhaps I'm missing something but now I have to drop in the new version of the file which creates another "cube" I then have to relink the displacement to the new input cube. (And I can't delete the old cube btw - perhaps I need to read the manual?)
Further down the road, as I iterate changes to the input file, having all the files update and resave automatically would mean back in modo, ALL my surface maps would reload and I woudn't have to do anything further.
Please consider - thanks!
-Will
Perhaps with this throw in a related Photoshop feature. With one of the drawing tools selected if you click once, then hold down the shift key and click somewhere else, you get a straight line between the points.
Very handy when I'm hyped up on sugar and caffeine and can't draw a strait line if my life depended upon it.
It already works here.
I have "[" and "]" set as a keystroke on my stylus (Wacom Intuos 3).
One stylus button increase the brush size, the other one decrease it.
It is the setting I use in photoshop to change the brush size and this
setting also works in Shader Map 2.
Have a try!
I have a few (really trivial) feature requests:
* Could you make double clicking an entry in the "Map List / Add Maps to Project" list do the same as using the <- button?
* Could you add a button next to the map zoom slider to link changes to all of the other maps - so you can set a zoom and then switch back and forth between maps and see certain areas up close in various maps. Hmmm, I guess I'd also need it to match the scrolling in the same way.
* A Bilinear filter option for the map viewer would be helpful to see what the map is going to look like up close in a game. The point filtered maps are a bit hard to see above 300%.
* A Button next to the zoom slider to fit the image back to the window size would be a nice convenience.
Hope this helps, the app is so polished already!
Regards,
David
Great ideas! - added to the list.
Currently you can double-click a map in the preview to reset it to the fit zoom state. A button would be helpful too (with a keyboard shortcut).
Adding a control to match up zoom states (combination of zoom and horizontal strafe) is a great idea. Of course this would only work for maps that have the same resolution (in the same hierarchy). I could also create a check box in the options to always match up zoom states for maps in the same hierarchy.
Thanks,
Neil
not sure if there are some known problems with this but i had to start my project several times from scratch because of this. and because of that and because i used some special material setups i had the following idea:
- it would be really helpful to be able to import the map setup from other projects and use on a new texture so the setups do not need to be created from scratch in every new project:D
an other smaller issue that i noticed:
- when i used batch export on existing diffuse maps, the new names of the spec/normal/ao were really nasty like texture.jpg_texture_SPEC.jpg or something like that and i had to rename all of them manually. would be cool if the name would be stripped so only the later part of the name gets written as texture name.
other than that i had a great day testing and playing around with different nodes (are they called nodes in the material editor?) and created some fancy looking setups:D
i hope this is the right place to post this:O
EDIT: oh yes and i almost forgot, it would be really awesome if maps could be copied, lots of times i use multiple displacement channels from same texture to get a bit more variety and more distinct channels and it would be cool if one could just drag copy them or so:D
Are you receiving any errors? If so what are they? And if not could you possibly look in the log files when a crash happens? They are lacated at: "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\SM2\log\"
EDIT: This may be caused by a crash bug I just found. It relates to the brush / material grid positions not being saved. I have fixed it and it will be released in the next version.
I agree. This feature will be added in a coming update. You will be able to create template projects from existing projects. Templates will be accessible from the start screen.
Currently developing SM2 R1 or 2.1, which is mostly focusing on the Normal Editor. Expect this feature in R2.
Expect this to be fixed R1.
In the material editor, I just call them materials. Is that what you mean?
Sure! But from now on go ahead and start a new Thread (rather than post to old threads) when you have new ideas and issues.
Great idea. There will be many improvements to the map interface in R2. These will include cloning and adding new maps without the 'Map Setup'.
We appreciate your feedback. If you continue to have crashes when loading projects, please start a new Thread about it with any error messages you are getting.
Regards,
Neil
i created a new thread to post mode details about this issue
http://shadermap.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=60
materials it is then:D
great to hear that many things will get improved/fixed, thanks for the reply.
im glad to provide feedback and ideas to improve this already amazing software:D