Creating materials on Grasshopper

[ous_abouras]

It would be super useful and powerful to be able to have an interface on Grasshopper to create our own materials. A workflow similar to the one we find on blender.

[natali.velcheva]

Hello, ous_abouras,

There is a "Materials" section in the V-Ray tab in Grasshopper, which contains several options for creating materials. The one that has the most control is the V-Ray material from Project.
The original material is created in the Asset Editor and then it is transferred via the mentioned component to Grasshopper. Any change in the Asset Editor will be taken into account immediately in your definition.

What is the goal you want to achieve? We can provide a detailed workflow that will be most suitable for your project.

Kind regards,
Natali Velcheva

[matthewau]

Maybe the least that could be included is bump and diffuse inputs for the vray simple component. Better though would be a Material Advanced component that gives access to the full range of vray material inputs including refraction, anistropy, etc. Not having this seems like a lost opportunity to enable a Substance Designer like workflow in vray for grasshopper. Even better yet, would be the ability to package materials and textures created in grasshopper with a toggle button.

[ous_abouras]

I agree with most of the comments @matthewau is suggesting. The material component does not have many inputs, including bump and refraction which are essential in creating a material. I would love to explore creating materials on GH with a bump or even displacement of that material. The bitmap texture also misses the opportunity of using operators like "mix" which I constantly use when creating materials.
Would also love to have the multiple material options you find in the Vray tabs (like Generic, car paint, hair etc..). The most useful would be the "multi-material" preset to create PBR materials, which the grasshopper workflow could be super useful for.


Another suggestion, from a UX/UI pov: when you drag an image from a folder onto GH, GH will put it in an image component and you can view the image. It would be great if you can drag the output of that component and put it in the material component (as an alternative option to providing the file location), or perhaps Vray could have its own GH component where I could drag the image on from a folder and it can preview the image on the screen. This can be super helpful as it is hard to visualize what images we would be manipulating.