Hi, please understand that we cannot change a Forest feature by the feedback of a single user. We must must consider carefully any change, because it may affect the experience of many customers.
Anyway, i just discussed this issue with our team, to have several opinions:
- Although the "Material" parameter may be redundant for scene objects, it's useful for library items. It's more convenient to get the material from the FP object, that search it on objects stored in the hidden layer.
We could set the material parameter only for library items, and not for scene objects... but then some FP would have materials assigned and others not. That may be more confuse for less expercienced users.
- Forest doesn't create a copy of the material, but an instance of it. You should get the same result picking the material for the Geometry rollout, or from the object.
A different issue is if you assign a new material to the object. In this case the link is lost, and the material parameter has preference.
- As you know, the material behaviour can be overrided setting copyMaterialFromObjects=0 in forestpack.ini.
In old Forest versions several variables (including this one) were reset when Forest is reinstalled, but we changed this in recent updates (i'm not sure what version exactly, but for sure in FP6).
I just did a quick test upgrading FP 5.4.1 to FP6, and the variable keeps unchanged. I don't know why it changed in your case... may be you reinstalled from FP5.x to FP5.x ?
- We have plans to expose most of the forespack.ini variables to the interface, specifically to the new General->Settings dialog. It will be done in upcoming updates.
Thanks for your understanding.