As user I want to create Physics Materials directly from the physics components

[AMZN-Gene]

Describe the bug
The icon to open the physics material editor is greyed out. As a result, I wasn't sure where to create a new physics material.

Steps to reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open Editor
2. Add an entity with a PhysX Shape Collider component
3. Notice the Physics Material selection icons

Expected behavior
Icon to open the Physics Material editor is available and clicking on it will open a window that allows me to edit, add, or delete physics materials to my project

Actual behavior
The icon to open the physics material editor is greyed out

Found in Branch
Development latest

[moraaar]

This is not a bug, but working as designed. The button will be available once there is a material assign to the field and it will take you to edit the material assigned. The button is not suppose to "create" a new material.

It's a valid request though to have some UI connection between where the materials are used with where the materials are created (Asset Editor). The good news is that we have plans to address this in the future to make it work in the same way as the Material Component.

I'll change this to feature request to track it. (@hultonha)

[AMZN-Gene]

I thought that same icon would open Script Canvas Editor even if there wasn’t a script attached.
A tooltip saying “Use Asset Editor to create/edit materials” might be enough. Discovery through play.

[moraaar]

Script Canvas Editor only creates 1 type of asset, so it's clear once the user is taken there what they have to do, but in this case Asset Editor tool creates many types of assets and one of it is Physics Materials, but just taking the user there is not enough in this case, it might be a bit better but they'd still have to do the effort to manually select they want to create physics materials and not other types.

[AMZN-Gene]

Totally, opening the Asset Editor is not ideal. I think seeing the Asset Editor open up might have been enough of a nudge for me to figure it out. Beats having to find the answer on o3de.org.
Is there a GHI for tracking the new work for making it work like Atom materials?

[moraaar]

No GHI at the moment. @hultonha, maybe a GHI for LYN-12169 could be created? I'm happy to make this one the GHI for this :)

[hultonha]

Do you mean making a tracking issue @moraaar? I'm not sure having a GHI for LYN-12169 makes sense as it's just a grouping, but we can create a reference issue for this and move it under LYN-12169 if that makes sense?

[moraaar]

Whatever suites best to track "PhysX gem provides its own Material Editor Instance tool, accessible from PhysX components, to override PhysX materials per entity, like in the Material Component." (that's in the description of LYN-12169)

[hultonha]

Leave it with me, I'll sort something out 👍

[lgleim]

Based on the above discussion, this issue was accepted in today's triage. Should sig/ui-ux also be involved somewhere in this process?

[moraaar]

@hultonha and I discussed this further and this is the roadmap item that covers this functionality: #2897
The part 2 of that item covers "Physics Material Editor Instance Tool", which will allow customers to create physics materials directly from the Physics Components, the same way that it works for Material Components.

Based on the above discussion, this issue was accepted in today's triage. Should sig/ui-ux also be involved somewhere in this process?

The goal is to unify workflows to make render materials and physics materials work in the same way. So it'll use the same UI from Material Component (which was already approved by ui-ux) for Physics Components. So I'd say it's not necessary at this moment to reach to ui-ux, but at some point before starting the task, yes, to confirm the direction and that everything is ok.

Tagging @bhanuja-s from ui-ux for awareness, we already had a brief discussing about this some months ago. Once the task is closer to be in progress it can be revisited

[hultonha]

Thanks very much for the update @moraaar 👍