You can make the material panel's shaderball a little larger, 48x48
pixel, but indeed that's it.
One option for you would be to pop an Object View (it tracks the
selection) and open a render region in it.
You could also make a custom view that drives either an object view or a
Shelf (it's what is shown in the top part of the material manager) with
the material used by the current scene selection.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ponthieux, Joey
>
> Luc-Eric,
> Thanks for the reply. From the material panel thumbnails are really
> small and I've found no way to change that. It's not very useful for
> what I need it for. I do realize I can use the Material Manager and
that
> I can call a viewer from the Rendertree, unfortunately what I really
> want is to be able to call it directly from the property page.
>
> The point is that on occasion I don't really need either the
rendertree
> or material manager or the material panel. I'm doing something quickly
> and setting up base materials, for pre-vis, mockup stuff, or initial
> creation generally and I'm using a simple mass construction approach
> where I am using the Model>Get>Material command to apply base
materials
> without having to leave the modeling scope of the interface. When I
> generate and assign a material this way(it's very SI3d hehe) a PPG
> opens and I can do some basic tweaking to the material but I don't
get
> a shaderball to see the result of the tweaks.
>
> What I would really like is a command...a V Button or whatever, on the
> PPG which would call a new shaderball which is connected to the PPG I
am
> working with. I want the shaderball to set shading, specular,
> approximate reflections, and transparencies etc very quickly. I will
go
> back and refine the materials in the rendertree later, but for now I'm
> just wanting to do basic setup and move on. The Material Panel would
> have worked for this if it provided a full shaderball viewer but it
doesn't.
>
> It would be really nice if I could open a shaderball viewer manually,
> set it to respond to the currently selected or created material,
and/or
> have the ability to drag and drop the materials_ or models_ which I
want
> the shaderball to reflect. Being able to dock the full shaderball to
> PPG, or Material Panel, would be nice as well. Since you can hide
> aspects of the Material Panel from view you could affectively reduce
it
> to the shaderball if needed to work the way I expected the shaderball
to
> work originally(but doesn't) that is to update with the selected
> material or geometry. Icons to control the hide/unhide of Material
panel
> options would.....
>
> well I think you get the picture.
>
> Thanks
>
> Joey Ponthieux
> NCI Information Systems Inc.
> NASA Langley Research Center
> ____________________________________________________________
> Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and
> do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.
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