Shader presets in Surfaces pane

Hiro Protagonist

The Presets tab under the Surfaces pane is very handy for getting to presets quickly when working on materials. However not all the shader presets appear in there despite being categorized the same as those that do appear. After some investigation I found that the shaders that don't appear are those whose Type has been defined using the subcategories of Shaders, e.g. Preset/Shader/MDL.

Am I correct about this, is it a known issue and can it be fixed?

DrunkMonkeyProductions

Welcome to the insanity of cms and meta-data.

AFAIK, your presumption is correct, to a point.

While the presets may be defined Shaders, they may also be defined for certain items only, and when something else is selected, they won't appear in presets.

For instance if you have a shirt selected, then only shaders compatible with that should appear, whether those be base shaders, or item specific. you might also get shaders for g3f and other things, while in some cases you won't see anything. This is totally dependent on the meta-data file associated with the product.

It's part of the reason i stopped using cms in the first place, too much clean up and creating new meta-data files.

 

Hiro Protagonist

In the case of the shaders I'm talking about, though, it's not a compatiblities issue. The compatibilities are all set to /AnySurface, the same as the shaders that do appear in the Presets Tab.

I've done further experiments by changing the asset "type" in a shader set (JGreenlees' Paint & Suede Shaders) from Preset>Shader>MDL to Preset>Shader. They then appear in the Surfaces Presets tab.

So shader presets will not appear in this tab unless their type is set to Preset>Shader. If they are set to a sub category of that (e.g. MDL) they don't appear.