Hi Greg,

Thanks for the examples.

Please suggest what you need here:

https://www.maxon.net/en/support-center

"Share Your Ideas"

Here, we can look into it and perhaps refine your input. Please note this forum is not a replacement for the "Share Your Ideas"< I will support anything that makes anyone's work more accessible and better.
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The number of channels used for Game Materials is typically as small as possible, yet many inputs are possible, and, going by Unreal's Substrate idea, we might see changes in the way materials are defined. Not to start a discussion about Unreal here, not the place, but you mentioned Game Engines, and yes, I'm sure every good idea submitted is welcomed.

The main question that I imagine will come up is why not set materials up so they can produce the wanted data directly. This would be more future-proof, as the separation of information would be integrated from the start.
Of course, I'm not able to check a few hundred materials, if that is always an option, so this is more of a question for you to explore.

When you want to blend the weight, why not set it up as a Node before the Standard Material, then Blend this Node value (single parameter or texture) and feed it into the Layer option for the Custome AOV feed?

The single values can be used in the specific Standard materials anyway; they do not need to be set up inside.

With this, retrieving the data is no longer a challenge; you have it already.

Besides this, blending the data separately allows for an independent change per channel.

Again, the Multi-Standard Material/Material Blend can be used as before. The Blend Color stands as an example for all channels in use, so it can be taken directly to be Stored as AOV.

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I have created a simple setup to demo it. It needs to be seen at render time.
CV4_2024_drs_24_RSsc_01.c4d

I would like to stress that this is a suggestion and not something that I have used in any production, so please test this carefully. I hope it helps you get your data as you would like it.

All the best