I quite often import multiple textures at the same time while working in the editor, and I liked the dialog box that came up for each texture because it allowed me to set the compression settings and LOD Group from the start and I could just leave them alone after that. As it is, you need to go to each texture in the Content Browser and set the compression settings in their properties one by one.
Now, I saw in a previous post that a method was being worked on for possibly automatically detecting the textures, like normal maps, and setting the compression settings automatically. I would really like to see a system like this implimented with a few adjustments:
Presets that are implemented that can be changed by the user. Say for example you have one preset that you would make and name “Character” which allows you to decide “LODGroup” settings (Like Character, CharacterNormal, etc.) for regular textures and normal maps, compression settings, whether to flip the green channel of the normal map by default or not, etc. You could then make another preset named “World” if you wanted and have these settings changed as well, especially the LODGroup.
With this in place a user would then choose to either stick with the default, automatic method of importing if/when its available, or choose a preset to suit their needs upon first importing their textures. Having these presets combined with the automatic texture detection, this would at least eliminate having to specify the settings for each texture one after the other like it currently is for UE3 when importing textures, and allow the user to import one or many textures with just the single preset that detects the type of texture and uses the presets to determine what settings are changed.
One other thing that could make this method a little more surefire is if users could decide whether to use automatic detection for texture type or assign specific user-defined suffixes such that you could specify “_Diff”, “_Mask”, etc. to use TC_Default compression and “_n”, “_Norm”, “_Detail”, etc. to use TC_Normalmap compression. Combined with the presets, this would make the basic texture settings for compression be set, as well as the more specific LODGroup settings. Taking this even further would be the ability to have the editor detect alpha channels and set those settings accordingly (Especially for normal maps as these currently need a completely different compression setting to allow the alpha channel to be present, not just the Compression No Alpha checkbox".
It’s a lot, but I completely understand wanting to have automated systems in place so that users could import textures and just continue on with their projects. Having a little bit of a more user defined method in place to accompany this would help make sure everything is set properly in case of any minor flubs that could arise from a fully automated method.