I am using Corona for one year now and I think there are some improvements that could be made with the node editor, specially when compared to Octane's.
First thing is the behavior of the node editor. Corona's drag and drop system seems to me like just an extra step to get to the nodes. In octane, once you have the node material editor opened and you click in a material, it is automatically loaded in the node editor. You click in another material and, voilà, there it is. In Corona you have to drag and drop each material you wanna see the nodes of, usually the nodes come messed up, even above other ones you already had loaded in the editor. Once you have some materials loaded, you get lost zooming in and out, because the node material is not responsive to c4d's "S" hotkey [i wish S would work in c4d material manager too...], so you have to manually look for the desired material, sometimes among many many others. Personally, i would rather have this live update, to see the material in the node editor once it's selected in the material manager, than having multiple materials gathered in the material editor.
The node material editor could also have this on screen menu with all the nodes, Corona's and C4d's, like Octane (image attached). If it could be colorful, split in categories, even better. Displaying their interior values would be a shortcut, see how it is in octane. This way the material could be controlled using nodes only, no need to dig into tabs. In the same logic, it would make sense to have a node for displacement and round edges, so their parameters could be controlled with a node in the node editor.
Would it be better if you could control the UVW projection with a single node? Instead of having the uvw randomizer node between each bitmap node and the material, it could come before of everything, one single node connected to all the different maps, like octane render does. It would prevent the need of setting up the uvw randomizer node for diffuse and then copying it amidst the other channels. Could also be useful for scaling or rotating all maps at once with a single node.
I don't really see the point of having the normal map under the bump channel. To apply a normal map you have to go to base layer, scroll down to bump, enable it, click texture -> plugins -> corona -> normal. Wouldn't it be easier to have it as a category, like texture/glossiness/bump? This way you'd just have to attach a bitmap node. The same for round edges. (again, see how it is in octane)
This setup also seems to make it harder for material conversions, materials end up losing channels like glossiness, bump, normal, or translucency map. I think the last one has has something to do with this new need to check "thin shell (no inside)" in the general tab. In my opinion, this is also an extra step that we did not need. If i want to insert an translucency channel that was lost in some importing process (either FBX, from 3dsmax with maxtoc4d plugin, or quixel bridge - all of them have some problem with importing and converting materials), now i have to dig to the material proprieties: general tab > check thin shell > basic tab > check translucency > translucency tab > fraction value to 100% > texture. If only by checking translucency (which is inactive if "thin shell" is unchecked) it would automatically check "thin shell" and set translucency to 100% (which i believe to be more used then 0% between those who will turn it on) it would save the user 4 useless clicks (if you consider that one tree may have several leaves materials...).
Besides, "basic" and "general" could be a single tab, together they are all tall/long as the other tabs, like translucency, opacity, advanced. By the way, I think making "base layer" such a long/tall tab, putting together diffuse, glossiness, ior, edge, bump, anisotropy and rotation of the anisotropic highlight was a terrible mistake. It was so much cleaner when they were in separate tabs, there was no need to scroll to look for it (and i also find scrolling in this menus kinda risky, because you can end up scrolling a floating slider or a drop-down menu).
About the material converter: could it convert ONLY selected materials? Since there are so many problems with conversion (or with the way translucent materials are displayed in the viewport), I would like to keep track on which materials I am converting, also this way i can remember which ones i have already checked for missing maps. To do it now i have to open a new file, paste the object, convert its materials, go back to the main file, paste it, replace material, delete pasted object........
I was reading Corona 8 roadmap and noticed you have no plans on adding support to quixel bridge, is that right? It is so necessary, such a huge library and it takes so much effort to reattach all the missed maps when converting c4d materials to corona. I know nothing about codes, but it doesn't sound like rocket science.
I wonder if there could be a tool that would look up for missing maps, it only would have to look in the same folder for files with the same name, looking for suffixes like "normal"/"nrm"/"n.*" and attaching it to the correspondent material propriety. Something like poliigon material importer. I believe it would save users a lot of time when downloading assets from web and could be a way around converting materials issues.
Again regarding the roadmap, can we expect motion blur to finally work with animated characters in Corona 8? This is so necessary for archviz...
So, many little things that would make my life really easier (perhaps other people too?). I hope they are not that hard to implement.
