Let me just clarify one thing about yesterday’s post on materials: the new material system will let authors edit material parameters like shininess; it will not let the user change textures.
Objects will continue to require texture atlasing (that is, the use of one texture set with the individual images combined). Inside the company, we call this the “crayon rule” – Austin’s original analogy to explain atlasing to our art team was that you draw slower if you spend all your time putting a crayon back in the box and taking a new one out.
So materials will let you change some macro-parameters of how the object is drawn, but not swap out the texture.
