Feature request - Object naming

[Neon22]

In an attempt to be more reasonable in my requests :-)

In the resulting sunflow etc files that are created by rendering to file - the names of objects is as follows:
instance {
   name "Box1"
   geometry "Box"
   transform col 0.037037 0 0 0 0 0.037037 0 0 0 0 0.037037 0 -4.30478e-08 -4.30478e-08 0.444444 1
   shader "shader05"
}

Is it possible to instead name them based on the rule that created them ?
This way - manually searching for specific object names could help us to manually allocate different shaders in the file.

E.g. So If I make some boxes (say) from a rule I have labeled "character" or "track" then I could find it and change the shader to a new one I had added manually at the top.

of course this may be very difficult as the simple numbering scheme right now makes it easy to ensure that all objects are uniquely named.

Cheers...

[Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen]

Hi,

I do not think your requests are unreasonable at all - its just that I do not have a lot of time to put into Structure Synth, so I try to stay somewhat focused - and my main goal is to reach a "version 1.0" of Structure Synth with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. So I struggle to avoid 'feature creep'.

Wrt to your question - actually I think that the already existing 'type specifiers' in Structure Synth (a little known feature) is the right tool for this. In your EisenScript code you may append a 'type' to all primitives - e.g.: 'sphere::transparent' or 'sphere::opaque'. In your template files you can now create multiple substitutions, e.g:

<substitution name="box" type="opaque">
instance {
   name "{uid}"
   geometry "Box"
   transform col {matrix}
   shader "opaqueShader"
}
</substitution>
   
<substitution name="box" type="transparent">
instance {
   name "{uid}"
   geometry "Box"
   transform col {matrix}
   shader "transparentShader"
}
</substitution>

Regards, Mikael.

[Neon22]

wow. fantastic :-)
I did not know that...