Voxel Material Collection support for range of indexes per layer (MagicaVoxel)

[dastardlygames]

It'd be helpful to be able to have a Material Collection that supports specifying a range of indexes to be applied different materials.

In MagicaVoxel you can uses the NOTE field to give one of the 32 palette slots (8 slots/indexes) a shared material/name. I'd like to emulate that with Voxel plugin where a group of indexes have the same material applied but with their different Vertex Colours

An example being, say you wanted 1-8 to share the same Metal material and the next bank of indexes 9-16 use the same Wood Material.

This could perhaps be in the form of a slider or a start & end layer index per layer in the collection. The game Teardown does something similar to this.

[dastardlygames]

Here's an example map (in the .zip file) from Teardown. It uses the NOTE field in the vox file format to label banks the palette (32 banks of 8) with a different material/category.

Ideally I'd like to have 255 colours but fewer materials in use. One per type of physical material: diffuse, glass, metal, wood, paper etc. whilst keeping the vertex colour data.
island.zip

[dastardlygames]

I expect this wouldn't be compatible with the hardness system in VoxelDataAssets. Perhaps if there was a way to map palette indexes to a single index whilst preserving the vertex colours data?

[dastardlygames]

This may well be the solution although not super intuitive.

[Phyronnaz]

That's a great idea! Having the basic material collection and the hardness support ranges should be relatively easy to do and would be really helpful