In blender 2.80 there are many options for fine tuning displacement texture. Such capacity is not available for Texture in shader editor. Also I could not find a way to use generated displacement texture in Shader editor as a image texture Or saving that texture as image file without going into hassle of baking the texture. My proposal is to make Texture editor currently used in displacement / brush texture as a independent texture generator and use with any other feature of blender.
The Texture Editor is mostly a holdover from the old texture system for Blender Internal. We could rework textures in a bunch of ways:
- Remove Texture Properties, and integrate textures right into modifiers and brushes
- Add more capabilities for texture creation in material nodes
- Rework the way the Texture Editor works, so that these textures can be hooked into all areas - or possibly remove it
This is not going to happen for 2.80 though. It could happen simultaneous with the Everything Nodes project.
I think the texture editor first and foremost needs to become a compositor for finite-resolution images (like Substance Designer) instead of a weird sidekick to the shader editor.
Having finite resolution has many advantages - for example you can perform gather/scatter operations such as blurring much faster, or save out your textures as images. And an image, once computed, is just an image, often much more performant at render time than even mildly complex procedural shaders.
And yeah, you’d want to be able to hook these textures wherever you like (but in particular for brushes, modifiers and shaders). They should also be able to take inputs (constants) from the shader editor for parameters and images. Most importantly of all, you should be able to nest such texture node graphs within each other.
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Will there still be some bug fixing on procedural textures for modifiers?
Right now, the modifier stack doesn’t update when changing a texture that’s used in a modifer for example.
I’d create a bug report, but I thought that was for the beta?
@billrey I have some experience with Substance (since before it was known under that name) and once you’ve used it for a while, you begin to see the design cruft. I have very little programming experience, but I’d very much like to help make Blender’s design for the texture compositor even better than that. Whenever work on this starts in earnest, is there any way I can apply to be part of the team?
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You can create a design proposal with your ideas and then there will be discussed to be implemented. On right click select: https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/