Hi,
I would like to see some improvements to get a finer control and a faster workflow on texture mapping. Despite some great features introduced in recent years like UVW Randomizer and Triplanar, it can be sometimes really cumbersome to deal with mapping at the shader level. I tend to use a lot of "PBR" materials from Quixel and others providers, and stack details on top of it with other materials or basic properties to simulate wear, tear, dirt etc. So I end up very often with multiple texture scale inside the same material and if you know the current state of the Projector shader, it's no fun. Even if this last one had no issues, there are still some opportunities to simplify the workflow while gaining quite some flexibility.
Below are some sketches of how the shader could work and its UI.
The main idea would be to move the mapping step from after to before the bitmap shaders. So it needs a bitmap shader with a new input dedicated to mapping coordinates, and yes much like in other 3D softwares and render engines. I use quite a lot of PBR Materials now, I guess like many CG artists nowadays given the success of many CG assets marketplaces. So for every material we have to deal with at least 3 maps, often 5, without any additionnal shading. If I want to use the triplanar projection and the stochastic tiling, it quickly grows. And it's the same process for each material and map.
So by moving some features into this node, nodes networks could be quite decluttered, gaining space and efficiency.
The node would also allow to override the Material Tag mapping to use another one, much like the Projector Shader. But with the ability to sync it between multiples nodes, and to select a specific UVW Tag. By the way, why not add Triplanar to the projection type support ?
Last but not least, having UVW Randomization settings here would really make sense.
So with one (!) node you could get a fine control over projection, tiling, randomization, and do it for many maps at once instead of dealing with half a dozens of nodes for just one PBR mateiral. Even without using nodes it could really useful, it simplify greatly the shading network so in two clicks in the Attributes Manager you could get access to the material projection and randomization settings with no need to open the Node Editor, drag-n-drop the material and select all the nodes.
Hope my request could be considered, the Node Editor really needs some love, it has (almost) not evolved since
its release in version 3.
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