As much as I like the Live DB, there's some issues with it (using it inside the blender plugin):
- Language chaos .. it's nice that people can upload materials, that's an important bit, but I find it somewhat odd to find spanish material names. Either stick to english or provide a translation feature for people to fill out?
- Grouping: Stone is not usually "organic". Also finer grain would probably be better
- UI: The treelist UI is not very practical
- Broken materials: Either its a bug or there's broken materials ... some won't download or will not provide anything sensible and remain with a black preview and no nodes. Also, some have preview pictrues in the DB, that do not match what is downlaoded
Are there some plans to get this to a decent state?
Live DB Sadness
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Hi Voon,
Since the LiveDB is a library of customer/community submitted materials we can't control some of these things
1) There is nothing we can do about this. People are able to enter whatever they want for the name and description (including Klingon or Simlish)
2) This is also up to the user, they select the category the material is saved into (although we could go through and clean some of these up)
3) What would you prefer over a tree? Some form of filters or search?
4) This could very well be a bug or the materials themselves could be broken. Can you please list any you find like this so we can take a look?
Thanks
Chris.
Since the LiveDB is a library of customer/community submitted materials we can't control some of these things
1) There is nothing we can do about this. People are able to enter whatever they want for the name and description (including Klingon or Simlish)
2) This is also up to the user, they select the category the material is saved into (although we could go through and clean some of these up)
3) What would you prefer over a tree? Some form of filters or search?
4) This could very well be a bug or the materials themselves could be broken. Can you please list any you find like this so we can take a look?
Thanks
Chris.
Hello Chris ... thanks for taking the time to answer this .. I know whining isn't very popular 
2. Can this be accessed by me? I'll gladly bring some order into it and create a few extra categories etc.. there's not so many materials in the Live DB. Is there a web interface to it?
3. The Tree has the problem of quickly becoming very long with large lists, so you have to scroll a lot. Also, it wastes sideways space due to the cascading opening of "folders" and that space is scarce anyway on my screen I think to begin with, a simple "gallery" mode would already help ... just presenting all materials withy dynamically adding rows and columns with a little bar under the picture to describe the name (scrolling for names too large on mousover ... or mouse hint). Size of gallyery pic either selectable from a small pulldown (large, small etc). Basically a bit like the righthand area of a windows explorer, with a path on where I am on top to quickly change folders (metals, skin, wood etc).
These display modes can be selectable, so people can use whatever they like, should someone actually like the tree.
Search field is a good idea as well ... filters may very well help in quickly getting somewhere. Can be any textsearch, selection by color .. bumped or not, glossy/nonglossy, number of nodes (to select lighter ones on the GPU) etc .. basically any attribute a material can have.
4. Have to check later to see if I can list some
And yes, I love the idea of the LiveDB ... I find access to a list of user made materials for quickly getting to preview results is valuable.
2. Can this be accessed by me? I'll gladly bring some order into it and create a few extra categories etc.. there's not so many materials in the Live DB. Is there a web interface to it?
3. The Tree has the problem of quickly becoming very long with large lists, so you have to scroll a lot. Also, it wastes sideways space due to the cascading opening of "folders" and that space is scarce anyway on my screen
I think to begin with, a simple "gallery" mode would already help ... just presenting all materials withy dynamically adding rows and columns with a little bar under the picture to describe the name (scrolling for names too large on mousover ... or mouse hint). Size of gallyery pic either selectable from a small pulldown (large, small etc). Basically a bit like the righthand area of a windows explorer, with a path on where I am on top to quickly change folders (metals, skin, wood etc).These display modes can be selectable, so people can use whatever they like, should someone actually like the tree.
Search field is a good idea as well ... filters may very well help in quickly getting somewhere. Can be any textsearch, selection by color .. bumped or not, glossy/nonglossy, number of nodes (to select lighter ones on the GPU) etc .. basically any attribute a material can have.
4. Have to check later to see if I can list some
And yes, I love the idea of the LiveDB ... I find access to a list of user made materials for quickly getting to preview results is valuable.