I gotta say, I love the new layered texture you guys added over the clunky Maya layered texture I try avoiding when possible.
It really improved my texture workflow. Great stuff!
Agreed, although I wish they had added some auto labeling on each entry so you know which texture is going into which slot.
+1 here, it has been in Vray for Modo for couple of years, and it is nice that we have it in Maya now
Thanks for the input. There’s actually a few minor improvements that we want to make to the LayeredTex, it would be helpful to know what you think and if you have other suggestions.
- We need to figure a way for a user-specified label for each layer
- We need to make the move layer up/down arrows bigger (we’ve had reports that currently the buttons are way too small and are hard to find with the mouse cursor)
- There’s requests to add a ‘lock’ option, so that if you’re happy with a layer you can lock it to avoid changing it accidentally
Let me know if those make sense for you and if there’s something else we can improve.
Just a small nitpick, but every time I use it, I get just a little unsure of whether the layer stack is in ascending or descending order. Intuitively I’d expect the top layer in the interface to be the top layer in the layerstack, but in reality the direction is reversed. I wonder if anybody else feels like that?
The top layer in the stack is the ‘background’, and the bottom layer is the ‘foreground’. It’s opposite to photoshop, but then again - it follows the same ‘order’ as the blend material (coats stack up to ‘foreground’ and the bottom coat is the top/foreground layer - same with the layered texture).
I’d +1 the comment about layer order. Although yes it’s very simple at face value, it never hurts for these things to be explicitly clear. A simple arrow icon pointing upward might be enough? That’s one of the things I’ve always hated about Maya’s layered shader -- could never remember if the layer order went right to left or the reverse. Some sort of labeling ability is essential so glad to hear you’re already on that. Up down arrows are a bit small.
Oh dear. I would have the arrow pointing downwards, indicating the descending layer order. But now I wonder if even an arrow would be too arbitrary 
We’re open to ideas 
Initially, the thought behind the order was to follow the same order as the blendMtl for consistency. Our nodes have the layers vertically stacked, while the maya layered texture has it horizontally. Feel free to share any thoughts and ideas.