I am trying to better understand how materials work in Blender. I bought a truck model. I changed the color of the truck easily enough by deleting the existing color and using the Principled BSDF to create a new color. But in this case, I want to make the grille black and the bumper chrome. It seems they’re linked or grouped or parented? If I select the polys that make up the grille and delete the color, then change it…the bumper color changes too.
Questions:
1-Is there a way to unlink them and what’s this called?
2-And is there a way to select a material and find out what other objects share this color?
The reason your changes affect different parts is that they share the same material. Just click on the “+” near the material list, which will create a new material slot. Click the “new” button to create a new material in that slot, in the edit mode select the part where you want to give the new material to (you can hit the L button on your keyboard when the cursor is on it to select the whole part) then click the “assign” button under the material name. If you want to create a modified version of an existing material, just assign the same material to the new slot you created, then click the number near the material name to make it a separate material. Then you can make your changes without affecting the old one.
Since all the pieces of the model are joined in a single object, you cannot see how many different parts share the same material (unless you separate the parts) but you can select all the parts that use the same material by clicking the “select” button under the material name.
If you have multiple separated objects sharing the same material, you can select all of them by first selecting one, then hitting shift + L > Material.
