Design changes to the Resonite official tools

[Baplar]

Recently, the Art Team has released new versions of the common tools available in the Resonite Essentials folder, with updated visual designs.
A large part of the updates can be considered absolute improvements, such as the reuse of common materials and textures. And I also personally find most of the new and updated models and designs to be really cool.
Props to the team!

However, according to some of the discussions I saw on the Resonite Discord since they have been released, a few of the design choices seem to have been received with mixed feelings by some members of the community, myself included.
This is why I open this discussion to allow the community to provide feedback on the new tool designs.

[Dusty-Sprinkles]

The only thing I'm really not a fan of is the light on the default protoflux tool, but thats because I think the default tools shouldn't have lights. It makes sense for the snapping flux tool as a pet side project we get to have and that does a lot of fancy snazzy stuff, but I worry about it being -too much- for a default tool

[Baplar]

Agreed. Adding a light source to such an essential work tool seems like too strong of a visual distraction while doing work, in my opinion. And the performance aspect of this is arguably an important factor to consider too.

[Redd56]

I feel just toning it down a bit would be enough. A touch of light on your fingernail is enough but as is its so large that it engulfs half your hand

[Redd56]

just looked at it, theres some people who when they equip it. its so big it hits their face. much too big

[Baplar]

I’ll start with my own small grievances. My main one is the yellow tint on the dev tool's base and tip.
As the most important tool in a Resonite user’s belt, I feel like it should be adorned with a more neutral color. For example, I think the silver tint used on the new material tool would be a good fit on the dev tool as well.
However, I do admit that it’s mostly a matter of taste. If I’m in the minority to dislike the new yellow tint, I’ll gladly drop the issue and either get used to it or edit my own silver variant of the tool.

Edit: I also initially mentioned the light emitted by the protoflux tool, but I see Dusty beat me to the punch on that one, so I suppose it would be better to reply to his comment on that topic

[Baplar]

For reference, this is what I ended up doing on my personal copy of the tool.
Luckily, the Art Team made it super easy to edit! I only had to set the material’s albedo tint to a silvery color (0.88 for each channel, copied from the material tool).

[JackTheFoxOtter]

I personally like the yellow / gold. At the end of the day the tool colors are always going to be somewhat arbitrary, but I do think they should have a distinct color, and I don't think white / silver fits that very well. But I also just think it looks better.

[Baplar]

Fair enough. The touch of color does indeed give a distinctive identity to the tool. I can see myself getting used to it relatively quickly, and the new design becoming iconic over time.

However, I personally still do not particularly like that specific tint.
I think it would bother me less if it looked properly golden, rather than just... yellow. For lack of a better way to put this.
Then again, that too may just be a matter of getting used to it.

[ultrawidegamer]

https://discord.com/channels/1040316820650991766/1372257233462624306

Im going to post the link to the discord thread for additional context as well

[troyBORG]

I haven't had much of a chance to use the new tools yet.
I did just update my cloudspawn thing on my radial menu to link to the new tools. As I was still using v1 of the dev tools instead of the new v6 or so..

I wasn't sure do they have a cloudvariable to links to the new tool url so I could have the new version when they update it.
Like how do they pull the url for it when in desktop and you spawn it with the number keys. There must be some kinda value its pulling to get that URL...

[shininghero]

I like the new designs. Can't wait to get them into that swipe tools thing.

I will, however, recompress all textures to a maximum of 1k. The tools are not physically large enough to warrant that much pixel/vram usage.

[JackTheFoxOtter]

If you do use the asset optimization wizard to change the max size, don't actually make new textures, as that would sort of defeat the point of them now all using the same deduplicated assets.

Edit: Actually, I'm not sure it works like that.

[Banane9]

I approve of the deduplication effor in the textures - however, all the animated materials will never be deduplicated, because they're, well, animated. So there will be a full set of the animated materials with each instance of each tool.

Relevant: #4382

[Baplar]

The material for the animated shimmer is indeed instanciated once per tool.
However, its textures are shared between all tools using the shimmer (on top of being pretty small, 600x600), and the material is a simple Unlit, so the load on the GPU should be fairly small. Same for the CPU, as it's only using a simple setup with 2D panners.
All of this should be negligible in comparison to the complex flux considered in the issue you linked.

I think the most significant performance consideration that could be taken specifically for the visual design of the tools, is the light source on the flux tool, because it affects the rendering of the meshes in proximity to the tool.