Suggestions & feature wishlist

[Smarty]

Hm, well that works a little better. It still only works for visible objects, but I think I can work with that. Thanks.

[Smarty]

I had a couple of ideas related to colourspace conversion:

1. Alternate material attribute entry method: For material attributes where the colourspace is different between BT and the MAT files, have a little button which spawns a dialog where the user can paste float3 values directly from a MAT file, which BT then parses and converts to the Blender colourspace. This would make it easier for users who copy values directly from MAT files.
    
2. Export paint job mask colours: For truckpaint materials, add an operator which spawns a text dialog containing converted, pre-formatted base_color, mask_r_color, etc suitable to copy and paste into an accessory_paint_job_data definition. This would allow relatively quick/painless WYSIWYG editing of truck paint job presets.

[Smarty]

I got thinking again...

It would be kind of handy to have an operator on the SCS Tools shelf to disable rendering for all shadow casters (global) and/or all shadow casters in the current SCS object (like object.switch_shadow_casters_visibility, but affecting object.hide_render instead of object.hide). I think that map-model/prefab makers would probably like a similar operator for 'coll_' parts too... This would help users exclude them from bakes quickly.

I'm getting in the habit of keeping my shadow geometry on its own layer, so it's not a huge issue for me anymore, but it might be helpful for others...

[SimulatorSam]

^^
Please yes

[ohaha]

was this already suggested?

is it possible to have io_scs_tools outside Blender installation directory? like, maybe just some symbolic folder there, but with links to some other place on my hdd. it's really annoying to have to re-copy everything with each Blender update, not mention having to change the paths, in each .blend file, from e.g 2.78 to 2.79...
just sayin'

[Smarty]

If you set it up in appdata, it should automatically transfer when you upgrade iirc. So mine is in C:\Users\<user account>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.78\scripts\addons\io_scs_tools.

[SiSL]

Convertion Tools to automatically come with blacklist by default / new starters with: materials / def climate / shared components like GPS etc. common folders that are already in base game and hardly anyone touches.

Editing existing materials are already problem with updates being overwritten, hardly anyone using material editing but MASSES have to delete their vehicle reflections, shared stuff like gps after each convertion. Also mods made by rookie hands to include all these data can cause mass conflicts on all other mods unnecessarily.

It was perfectly okay before but with latest versions, those are included weirdly.

I suggest convertion tools blacklist to include many of these shared data, if people literally lesser than fingers on a hand want to edit existing materials, they are welcome to remove it.

[AlexeyP]

Just an idea for a further BT development: is it possible to add support for animations based on shape key drivers some day?

[50keda]

@AlexeyP: hmm...never used them. Do you have an example to look at? I am wondering what would be advantage to use shape key drivers instead of actions?

[AlexeyP]

@ Simon Ok, but a little history first, if you don`t mind. Some time ago i decided to make trailer side curtain animation for Schwarzmuller curtainsider trailer. It was first time when i started to create some animation for ETS2 btw. So, i`ve done this animation, but there was a little problem: curtain looked totally planar - no wrinkles, creases, wrinkles. Just plain curtain which was downscaled by Y axis. Important: when i did this animation i didn`t know yet how to parent one bone to another to make one "slave" bone, which will create this wrinkles. Right now i know how to parent bones, so my current trailer curtain animation looks this way (not perfect, but it works):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX0e7v5OOIo
Back to the story. So i didn`t know about how to create additional bones etc... but i knew about shape keys, which allow to create various curtains with those creases/wrinkles easily. I started to google and found the way how to connect bone animation with shape keys. So i did the animation with shape key driver and exported/converted it. But the problem was simple: it doesn`t work in the game at all. My thought was: "well looks like it is not supported right now... Will wait for its implementation".
You may ask what`s the point of adding support for this, if we can create some fabrics animation with adding more bones to animation action? It is fair. But one thing we can`t do - we can`t do animations which will use blender clothes physics simulation. Here is an example which i did today. This vid shows one of the side door curtains (as description says).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVh48Hz9ayc
It has cloth physics baked as a shape key and a single bone shape key driver. So, if shape key drivers will be implemented someday, we can create rather realistic cloth objects with rather realistic physics.