The new PBR materials are cool, and I really like this direction that SU is evolving. That said, the materials options themselves really are begging for a lot of improvement. SketchUp is used by countless people around the world for all sorts of purposes, but building-construction-related design is certainly one of the most common uses. It would be so appreciated if the Trimble development team put energy into modernizing the default material libraries to actually be really good. This would mean providing native SU materials with PBR attributes that reflect high-quality textures that cover the span of common construction materials. Consider roofing for example… every home I’ve ever designed has either Composite Roofing, Standing Seam Metal, TPO/Membrane, or Vegetation. But none of these are materials available within SU… instead, there is Thatch, broken stone slate, Parisian tile, and some weird green metal rib; these are exceedingly rare materials to use in the real world. This applies for pretty much all of the texture categories… the users of SU would rejoice if the next release included a wide library of common modern Tile, standard lumber species that tile well, various types of sheathing, all metals, common modern sidings (B&B, horiz. lap, fiber cement panel, corrugated metal, etc.), ground covers, pavers, etc…
Ideally, these materials would come as a bundled low-res and high-res version, for streamlined workflows that can be swapped depending on modeling-speed vs. presentation quality.
I do use multiple other platforms (Lightbeans, Architexture, etc) to gather high quality materials for my work, and I’ve built good libraries for my own use. These all look good and render well in Enscape, but most don’t have correct PBR attributes to take advantage of SU’s new graphics … as SU has taken this big leap forward in image quality, it just really seems like a robust material library is something that should be provided as a baseline. It would really make the program so much more elegant, relevant, and enjoyable.
Final note for a Material feature-request… the material editing process in SU Mac is so much worse than in SU PC. It would be really nice if the Mac editing process was streamlined a bit; even just the process of selecting the color you want is cumbersome, and often difficult to actually find the feint blue bounding box that designates the color swatch you’ve selected.
Thanks!