Budget: $40 (and if anyone else sees the need for this feature please help me pay whoever can make it for us)
How it should work:
- right click in 3d viewport > “select material” menu item.
- cursor turns into a eye dropper
- click on almost anything: poly face of an object or a collection instance or dupliverted object or geometry node based object
- the addon should figure out what the material is on the face you clicked on, make a new polygon object somewhere out of sight, select it, apply the material to that object so you can edit the material in the shader editor.
Why I want it:
Every day I have this annoyance. Today I’ve got this geometry node based chandelier that I haven’t touched in like a year. I don’t remember if the different parts that come together to make up this object are in this current file or linked in from another file. Even if they are in this current file I don’t remember if they are 20,000 leagues under the Z axis or in another scene or if the collections they are in are set to “Exclude From View Layer” which means I can’t actually see them in the outliner, etc.
I just want to be able to click on anything in the viewport and get the material under the mouse to appear in the shader editor so I can edit it without wasting half an hour trying to find and select the actual source object so I can finally access the material.
I just want to reduce subsurface scattering on this candle material but finding the candle is a chore. I didn’t name the material and I have 30 other candle material experiments I had been trying and there’s a couple of other assets in this scene linked from other files with material names like candle_* and wax_* and *_candle and *-wax etc etc etc. Just let me click on a damn pixel and get the material that is coloring that pixel. It would make life so much easier.
Right now the “easy” solution is to duplicate the chandelier, go into geometry nodes and add a “realize instances” node then apply geometry node modifier to have a real object and then I’ll be able to access the material I’m looking for.