Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Improved LW Materials Interface

Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
I would like to see the LightWorks materials interface improved. My wishes refer to the attached screenshot, where I should note that both previews refer to the same material.

Wish 1: I'd like to have the name of the material from the LWA archive (and possibly the archive name, too) displayed in the dialog, perhaps above or below the "Load Settings from Archives..." button. In the screenshot, I'd like to see:
"Sandstone [Essential.lwa]"

Wish 2: Given the above, if we modify the settings, clearly the material will not match the given name any longer. Place an "*" for modified after the name and have a "Revert" button appear in that case, so that the user has the option to revert to the original material def without going and finding it.

Wish 3: The flat preview image in the "Load Settings" dialog is nearly worthless. It is too small to judge the material, and it does not reflect all of the material settings. Thus, one has to try materials one at a time, clicking OK, and then viewing the result in the Material Settings sphere preview. I'd like to see one or more of these sub-wishes:

3(a): make the preview image in the Load Settings dialog bigger, or

3(b): add an "Apply" button to the Load Settings dialog so that we can keep it on the screen, and see the results in the MS/sphere preview quickly ... also reading from there what the Reflectance/Transparency, etc values are.

3(c) the above would be fine for me, but another alternative is to do as in Piranesi and after the name in the Load Settings dialog, have codes to indicate the reflectance, transparency, etc.

Wish 4: The sphere preview at the top left of the MS dialog is OK for many materials, but just doesn't work for things like bricks, stone, etc. I'd like to have the option of displaying a cube instead of or in addition to the sphere.

Wish 5: I'd like a larger preview image. If this is expensive (in generation time), then I'd like a button that one can click on when needed that pops up another window with a larger preview image, as rendered, so that we don't have to apply the material to something in our model, render that, and repeat the entire material evaluation process.

I'm really happy that we have the LW engine now, and hope that through these and more wishes, we can make the user workflow more visual and smoother. 😉 At the moment, choosing, evaluating and fine-tuning LW materials is a slow and tedious process IMHO.

Thanks,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
4 REPLIES 4
__archiben
Booster
karl

i tend to agree with all of your comments (i think i would plump for 3b out of those options, however). when i first tried to figure out the lightworks interface and what to do to really get to grips with the materials, i was baffled. i think it became the first time i've read a user guide for a long time!

but i wonder how much of this is down to the lightworks license, and how much to do with graphisoft's own design and integration of the engine?

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
~/archiben wrote:
but i wonder how much of this is down to the lightworks license, and how much to do with graphisoft's own design and integration of the engine?
Don't know. But, as I understand, LW is just a licensed library with no interface, so I believe these interface matters are completely up to GS. Maybe someone here has experience with some other LW-enabled apps and can comment?

Thanks, Ben,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Balazs Simonyi
Graphisoft Alumni
Graphisoft Alumni
Already added to wishlist.
Further improvements are welcome
James B
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
This has been on my archicadideas page for while and I produced it pre AC9 but I think it still have some relavance, well hopefully it does.

One of my main gripes with materials settingts is that you cant see a complete listing or materials - ie at a glance.

James Badcock
Graphisoft Senior Product Manager