Everyone else is switching to material nodes. 
I love iClone's simplicity but the nodes would allow us to exploit the power of iClone's PBR. 
MAKE IT NOW.

Hahaha!! NODES ??? Seriously?? You really want this only for water texture??? The day when Iclone sell nodes for textures
I live it at the speed of light....

I watched some tutorials on how to prepare materials for Blender eevee. It's nice to have more control perhaps, but the complexity seems over the top.

What you would be doing is incorporating Substance Designer in iClone, which doesn't sound like an attractive proposition.

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@mtakerkart - LOL!  that is UE4 right, why did they need to make the water so complex...that better be some damn good water!...
I mean, what is that...Poland Springs water?
But you are correct, UE4 has the power to do such things BECAUSE it yes it has the nodes.

I'm actually thinking of more simple instances of further blend modes for channels in iClone. 
So, for example, in iClone, or CC3, on a Diffuse channel, you can only blend with one Blend channel.  (ie on a timeline warp from red to blue)
But what if that could be noded to 2 inputs so you could have 2 active Blend nodes.  (ie warp from red, then to blue, then thirdly to green)
On iClone screen as is would get cramped as you then need to list multiple Blend-slots (ie Blend1, Blend2), but in a node-based scenario, you would have a grander map of real-estate to work with.

@animagic - OMG...please, I would never want it to be so needlessly complicated as Blender Eevee. 
I mean, to have your node-layout on a material be complicated, in order to achieve a visual effect, is one thing.
But to make the node linking process itself needlessly complicated, even for a simple node function, is another.

PS - Substance Designer...anyone use it, is that still around...?

Maybe you should visit the SD web site, it's still being used by some of the best artists around today. 


Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

Interesting idea, but I would place it waaaaay down on the list of things to do.
Way below improvements to the native renderer, for example.


Anyone use Substance Designer?  In the iClone community, it might be a limited audience, largely because it's hard for a one-man-studio to do everything.  But SD is a major force in the AAA gaming community and an increasing force in the movie VFX industry.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Actually Substance Designer winds up becoming a side discussion here, the reason being is that even if using it, in iClone you still only then have a single Blend node, as opposed to 2 blend nodes.

But why does this matter? 
Because of animation - with 1 Blend node channel you only still have the ability to morph from red to blue over a timeline, not from Red, to blue, then to green.
In UE4, with its nodes, you could animate from Red to Blue, then to Green, in a timeline.  (albeit the UE4 timeline I am referring to is really a sequence in a 'game-timeline'). 

So SD can offer all the material tweaking in the world, but it doesn't do any more than be the texture 1 or texture 2 in a timeline blend.
It itself doesn't create a texture 1, to texture 2, to texture 3 scenario, animatable over a timeline. 

You can use a Python script to morth more than 2 or 3 or more and animate over the timeline.

Regards
Chris.

Well...By Pythonian logic I can do anything via script. 
But this is not what I am looking for.  Say, then I wanted to morph the Normal, and then AO, and the Glow, and the Bump, with multiple textures...it would be so much work to manage through Python....
But through a node map, it would be much easier.  

I mean, honestly, could you imagine UE4 getting rid of its Node base layout for materials, and replacing it with Python scripting?....
Would its users just be like, "Oh, so much easier now!!!..."

I'm unclear about the inability to blend texture 1 to texture 2 to texture 3 on the timeline using Substance Designer.  You can make a wonderfully complex material and if you expose parameters, you can keyframe them on the timeline.  What's missing?

You can also use Substance Designer to create a material that will "change over time," using the $TIME variable, and it will work in iClone.  That's very cool for something like water caustics in a swimming pool.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD