I think it’s a funny idea to have little screenshots as thumbnails for the material presets, but I would prefer the classic sphere or cube as an icon. It’s the best information about the surface you can get and seen side by side spheres do look nicer. After all it’s about the materials, not about the model that happened to use it.

When setting up materials it would help to see changes immediately. Nice as it would be for colors too, I think it’s really important for specular and gloss.
The icons for connecting material properties hardly deserve their name ;) They could be bit bigger and better to see, the fields for the color don’t need to be that long..

Ok. Perhaps we could have an option for this.

One thing I find frustrating about the material presets icons is that because it captures the screen when they are created, your light setup sometimes yields a misleading representation of the material. I would prefer if all materials were screen grabbed with the default lighting setup much like all the default material presets are. I just am too lazy to stop and throw that lighting preset on before I set a new material preset. Agree on the spheres btw.

It would be very convenient to just drag materials onto a mesh from the object list or from the materials property tab.

The current method seems in some way similar to that of Maya (note: I’m not an expert of Maya), while I much prefer the method of 3dsmax, it works a lot easier and it does everything everyone’s asking for in this thread.

Which makes me wonder, how close is the whole Autodesk company? Is Mudbox being worked on by mostly Maya developers?