BAM Addon - Tool for Batch Setup/Update of Materials in Blender

Hi guys I want to share with you my FREE Addon for Blender. I really hope you enjoy it :smiley:!

BAM - Blender AutoMat: Universal Tool for Batch Setup/Update of Materials in Blender.
Setup hundreds of materials from your texture library in 1 click and manage them with the easy-to-use Material Manager.

Dont miss the Intro Video:

:arrow_down: You can download the BAM Addon for free on my Artstation, Gumroad and Blender Market
Download links inside the video description

Tested on Blender versions: 3.6, 4.0 , 4.1

:speech_balloon: **BAM - Blender AutoMat Story **

A couple of years ago, I conceived the idea of creating an instrument for Blender that could handle the mass installation of materials and facilitate convenient workflows, similar to what I had in Maya. At the time, there were no similar tools available for Blender.

As the Lead Technical Material Artist at Kitbash3D, specializing in material creation and texturing for large 3D Kits with Substance 3D, I needed a tool that would enable a seamless transition from Maya to Blender for handling a vast number of objects and materials. This need drove me to develop the BAM addon, which has gradually evolved to incorporate all necessary functionalities.

Today, I continue to refine this tool while learning Blender and Python in parallel. Many thanks to the Kitbash3D artists for their help with BAM testing.

Description:

  • Working with multiple objects and numerous materials in Blender is now much easier with BAM.
  • This addon is especially useful if you create many materials in Substance Designer and need to use them in large projects or build your own Materials Library

:mechanical_arm:What he’s doing:

  • BAM allows you to create new materials or update existing ones directly from your texture folder. It supports subfolders, custom suffixes, color spaces, presets, OpenGL/DirectX normals, and even channel selection for plug-in textures.
  • The tool optimizes material creation by avoiding endless duplicates of the same texture data-blocks, utilizing existing ones instead.
  • Materials are identified by the presence of a BaseColor texture

(If you need to work on a huge amount of materials in a scene, switch to Cycles as it processes materials much faster)

:video_game: Custom Presets:

Create Unique Presets: Customize your own packaged texture maps, such as ARM, by selecting a color channel for each texture**.**

  • _Suffix - Image RGB Channel - ColorSpace
  • Multi Suffix support , example: _basecolor, _albedo
  • Automatic upper and lower case recognition.

:abacus: Colorspace Control:

  • Color Space Settings: Set the color space of each texture relative to its suffix for correct display.
  • Apply color space settings to all texture files in your scene**.**

:white_check_mark: Filter:

  • Selective Material Creation/Update: Create or update only the materials you need.
  • BAM will prompt you to create new materials that are not already in the scene and label materials that are already present.
  • Additional buttons to interact with the filter: Check ALL, Uncheck All, and Invert will give you more comfort.

:tomato: BAM MaterialManager Description:

All of this along with the easy-to-use and simple Material Manager.

Create, delete, replace, select and analyze.

In addition to the basic options you will be able to:

  • Select all objects in a scene(or by selection) by material.
  • Select all Faces in the scene (or by selection) by material.
  • Replace one material with another, taking into account objects and faces.

Optimization options:

  • Mass Cleanup of unused Material Slots, for all non-hidden objects in the scene.
  • Mass Cleanup unused Materials, for all unhidden objects in the scene.
  • Fix duplicate materials with further reassignment to objects.

Indication options:

  • Now when you select an object or a group of objects, you will always know what materials are present on them.
  • Also when selecting Faces you will see additional indications of selected materials

Texture Update Options:

  • Update the material textures of the selected object or objects.
  • Also you can enable texture synchronization to automatically update textures from the moment of its activation, like Maya.

Manage your materials without taking a break from the process. The additional List “Materials on Selected” helps you make your work much more convenient.

As well as more options available in the first day update and in future updates :wink:

:interrobang: FAQ:

With the texture synchronization option, texture updates are too slow.

In the addon settings, you can configure a texture check interval (in seconds) that will check your texture files in the folder and in the Blender scene for an automatic Refresh.

Why does Blender Fully Freeze when creating or updating materials in large or medium quantities? Why does it auto switch to Cycles?

The thing is that during mass processing of materials Blender EEVEE tries to render all thumbnails of new materials, especially if you greatly expand the Material Manager window or it does shader compilation in EEVEE Viewport, which causes even Blender UI to hang.

To avoid long processing you can switch to Cycles, which does it faster.
In the addon settings itself, there is an option Switch to Cycles which switches your scene to Cycles, but you need to manually switch the Viewport to Cycles as well.

How it Works:

  1. Set your textures folder
  2. Configure _suffixes, _channel, colorspace
  3. Use the filter to highlight the materials you need
  4. Switch Viewport and settings from EEVEE to Cycles for faster shaders processing and materials thumbnail renders.
  5. Click on the button to Сreate and Update Materials

Addon Installation and Update:

  • To install the addon, unzip BAM and place the BAM folder in the folder with your Blender Addons.
  • To Update, uninstall the previous version of BAM and place the new BAM folder in your Addons folder.
    You can save your material_presets.json presets file from the previous version and replace it in the new version of BAM.

:arrow_down: You can download the BAM Addon for free on my Artstation, Gumroad and Blender Market
Download links inside the video description

Tested on Blender versions: 3.6, 4.0 , 4.1

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When I stop being just a new user on Blender Artists, I’ll add more pictures, links and videos to the post to make it more convenient for you guys :wink:

This is just the beginning of my journey in developing add-ons for blender and I am still learning a lot.

My Python skills are very superficial, I’m still learning it and the blender API so I will be happy for suggestions. In the future, I want to rework some things and pack more code sections into functions, as well as introduce new useful tools in BAM.

You can check my profile at ArtStation - Alexey HRDesign

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