Scene Material Folders

[bbergem]

I would love a gui function in which the materials in a scene could be organized into collapsable folders rather than a complete run-on list in the asset editor.

I try to keep my materials clearly named etc. But sometimes a component from the 3D warehouse will carry with it numerous of materials that are poorly and inconsistently named that just make a mess of my material list as they are a random assortment of actual material names and all sorts of variations of <auto1>, Col4, Material6, and even using the colours of the default scale figures! And the sketchup native material browser is already so in need of an update.

I would love to be able to put all the materials that might be associated with a component into folders so that they can stay a little bit "out of sight, out of mind."

My tendency is to add the prefix of "arch_" to all my materials so that they at least stay sorted together in the sea of anarchy. When I can I will run a script on a component to rename all its materials as well before adding it to a scene. But of course its not uncommon for a file to have 100s of materials so even then the list becomes a tedious to navigate.

[Peter.Chaushev]

Hello, and thank you for raising this topic. Asset grouping and/or asset hierarchy controls is something the dev team have discussed a lot ever since v3.6. I understand in large projects this is something the current V-Ray UI is lacking.
So far, though, we have not come up with a good solution that can provide sufficient user experience without inhibiting the asset structures used by V-Ray internally. We hope to have something to show in this direction in one of the future updates (after 4.1) - at first some quality-of-live improvements in terms of asset grouping. Later on, we hope to have a broader stable solution.

Let me know if you find any other aspects of the UI in need of improvement!

Kind regards,
Peter