Materials Warehouse!

Can we get a Materials Warehouse next??? That would be amazing. That way paint, textile, laminate, stone, and other materials companies can create official swatches with their own manufacturing names on them, like “Behr Mango Nectar P240-3” (It’s what I painted my sister’s front door). Interior designers and architects would absolutely love it. Wouldn’t it help with materials estimating, also, to have official names attached to materials?
We could “favorite” the materials we want to save for later, and create collections for various themes (Caribbean House Renovation Materials, for example), just like with Components. Then we could have all of those available to our Materials Window (sorry-“panel” in 2016) whenever we want, and also have them available to our team whenever we want by just sharing a link to the collection in the warehouse, similar to Components.

It could include paid materials, like the Extension Warehouse, but I’m sure it would end up mostly free.
It would need to be really easy to show file size, and display if the material has characteristics such as transparency and seamless tiling.
This would also be a nice thing to have because some 3D products can come in a variety of finishes or textiles, and instead of including every possible material in the 3D model, the options could be added as embedded links to materials or to a collection in the Materials Warehouse, maybe as a Component Option.
I would so love to help build this.

Actually, I sort of enjoy tracking down texture-worthy images on the web. As I’m sure I need hardly mention, there are millions of suitable photographs accessible through Google Image search, and a fair percentage of them are either already seamless-tiling or can be made so relatively easily using a bitmap editor. Turning an image into a SU .skm material is simply a matter of importing it as a texture.

Actually, I think it would be kind of odd for SU to offer a Materials Warehouse, since materials are simply 2D graphics–there’s really nothing particularly 3D-ish about them, and there’s no particular shortage of suitable images available from other sources.

Have you tried looking up that particular color on the internet? It’s already there (although you don’t really need an image to use the color in SU, just the RGB values, which are 254,213,159.)

Personally, I’d rather see the SU Development team make SU a better and better 3D modeler, not duplicate existing 2D graphic functionality.

-Gully