Realtime material editor?

I am trying to develop a solution that will allow the artists on my team to easily edit the material parameters. Ideally, this could be integrated into the mission editor to allow real-time previewing of changes made. As it stands right now, the materials.cs scripts are being tweaked on a trial-and-error basis which can be daunting for non-programmers not to mention very time-consuming. I imagine something similiar to the TLK integration in TSE which is basically just a little pop-up dialog with some options. So the artists could define the textures, bump map, specular lighting values, etc. within the engine interface.

My question is where do I start? I am somewhat new to TGE/TSE and am not sure the best way to go about implementing a feature like this. Obviously this would be released for the community if it turned out to be a useful modification. I'm sure we're not the only ones who would benefit from a solution such as this. If anyone can point me in the right direction it would be much appriciated.