I read through the FAQ and in the Blender 2.0 Book, but cannot
easily see how to load or save presets for Textures and Materials.
In the average case, I would expect not to have to create
materials or textures from scratch, but instead, load presets
that set all buttons, sliders, values in the material and texture
windows. The same goes for setting: if I set up a “mahagony
wood block” in the editor, I would expect to be able to save all presets
for this (not just image files), and then load it later. The only
way to achieve this right now seems to be to store all presets
in .blend files but if that is the case, this is an arcane method
of achieving preset functionality because it means I have to
add a “mahogany wood block object” into my scene, which I
don’t want to do (I just want the preset for this material and
texture). Thoughts? Perhaps, there is
a button that I am not pressing? Thank you for suggestions!
Blender does not have presets.
This helps in keeping Blender a compact program.
Sadisticaly enoght I might also add that this also keep Blender people smart and blender renderings very varied, since ther eis not a ‘Mahogany’ preset and you have to tweak your own mahogany which is your personal artistic view of mahogany.
Needles to say there are people which thinks presets are nice, so there is a blender material library lurking somewere on the net, but i (really!) can’t recall where it is.
Its name in
matlib
plus some number.
It is a blender file from which materials can be appended to your scene.
These are ONLY procedurals.
Stefano
You can pull in objects, meshes, lights, materials, textures, and scripts from other .blend files using Shift-F1. It brings up an open file dialog so that you can append or link (notice the buttons at the bottom) to different .blend files. To select more than one material/texture at one time, use the right mouse button to select the elements.
Like S68 mentioned, some people in the community have created .blend files that are dedicated to just storing their textures and materials.
yes, thank you all for these quick posts. I like the SHIFT-F1
idea, and had not realized it existed as a fairly clean way
to browse the innards of a .blend file for its components…
just didn’t know this was possible. I think this capability
has the apparent functionality of presets.
i just need to figure out this append-link difference and
the use of the material and texture editor interface, which
is a little daunting: the connecting of multiple textures to
materials, etc.
also, for some odd reason I always get these “addqueue”
warnings in the Blender console window, but they never
appear to cause any problems in Blender’s operation (for
2.25 or 2.26).
Thanks all!
The all of us get those messages, are debugging harmless messages.
Don’t worry 
Stefano
Speaking of presets…I have a file that contains 170 material colors. Translated rgb values to this library. Zip file is only 45k…any ideas on where I could post it ?
www.blender3d.org maintains some links to resources.
YOu can place it on your site and ask for a link
Stefano