What objects are using this material?

Support Materials and Textures
1

So I have this game project I’m working on for fun and it is fun!

My materials are very messy. I have linked materials in from other files, made materials in the main file, named my materials stupid names, “f” saved my materials when I didn’t really want or use them, used materials from several directories.

Now I’m cleaning house. I have all the textures nested in one directory, I have removed some duplicates and named the one’s I like with good names, but I have all these mystery materials and I don’t know what object they are attached to.

Is there a way to figure out which objects a given material is on?

2

You can use the “search” function in the Outliner. Enter the material name.

3

be aware, if you use nodes, then materials can “use” itself, preventing them from getting purged. shift-left click on the X to force purge.

4

Also in the outliner it is possible to choose Blender File as display mode and then go through the materials there. If you rightclick on a material and choose Select Linked it selects the objects that have the material.

You can also check it with python relatively easily:


import bpy

for every_material in bpy.data.materials:
    result = ''
    for every_object in bpy.context.scene.objects:
        for every_slot in every_object.material_slots:
            try:
                if every_material.name == every_slot.name:
                    result += '
   ' + every_object.name
            except:
                pass
    print(every_material.name + ' is assigned to:' + result if result 
          else every_material.name + ' is not used in this scene.')
5

SUPER SOLVED!

Thanks everyone! I am using all this to clean my materials. Hopefully, I can eek out a performance gain at the same time.

6

ok little problem.

I have created some buildings and they are in their own files. then I linked these buildings to another file to make cities. Then I linked the city file to the main file to create the world. So… if I have a brick wall material that is used for several buildings, I end up with several materials in the final “world file”.

ie.
building.blend 1 wallmaterial with texture from /texture
building2.blend 1 wallmaterial with the same texture form /texture
city.blend 20 wallmaterial I guess copies of the texture from /texture
world.blend 100 wallmaterial(can’t be good for performance)

I would like to combine these so blender only loads one copy of the material, not several and uses it on all the linked objects. Should I make them local and apply materials to whatever is broken? If I do and start messing with the materials, what will happen to the city and building files? I would like to reserve the right to edit them separately in the future.

I want:
building.blend 1 wallmaterial
city.blend 1 wallmaterial
world.blend 1 wallmaterial

Any sugestions? I think my textures are killing my fps.

Thanks,