Here are some thoughts about using macro (pre)sets.
Say you created a macro leather material. For nice usage this macro has two input pins; a scale and a basic color that you can change. The internals of this macro could look like this (just an example, it could be arbitrarily complex with numerous inputs):
Now say that you have three leather surfaces on your scene, where you would want to use this material, but each surface needs to have a different color (or any other parameter). You can save the macro & reload it two more times, like so:
This creates copies of the original macro. There are two major problems with this; with lots of materials this approach start to clutter the editor, but more importantly these are copies, meaning that if you wold want to change the internals your would need to resave / reload / delete old ones / replace. You would also loose or need to manually copy all the input values you have already defined on the old nodes.
A more elegant solution would be to have an "input list node", which would allow you to save sets of inputs you defined in the macro and then use this "modified" materials in various places on your scene. You wold add new sets in node inspector, name them and set the values. You would be able to change the internals of the macro material in one place and there is no need to save & reload (if you add new inputs to the macro, it would need to reflect the changes in the list node) and the inputs you already defined are (should be) kept.
Graphically this logic could be even integrated in the material macro, you would click a + sign that would add a new set to the list which would have it's own inputs and an output. YOu could collapse the list. This would lead to a more compact material representation:
- integrated_list.png (15.76 KiB) Viewed 803 times
Of course if this would be too complicated to implement, there could be other solutions. Basically the question is how to use variations of your materials, without too much hassle (while keeping flexibility & reduce clutter). In this example there are few materials, but when you have 40 of them (of which some are copies, just with different inputs) things start to become hard to manage.
