I feel that the material system is a disaster !. Everytime i work on a building wich uses 3-4 different material is gets very confusing. lets say that the first material has a brickwall texture. When i create another material (add new) it automaticly gets the same texture !, and what happens when i want to change the texture ?, it changes
the texture on the first material aswell ! What in the world chould anyone benefit from that ?
Can anyone please point me in another direction how to get a better understanding of this.
3dstudiomax works a 100 times better. Links to tutorials whould be nice.
Two or more materials can share the same texture. To edit a single instance of the shared texture you need to make that instance of the shared texture a ‘single user copy’.
On the Texture panel there is a number beside the texture’s name which denotes the number of users of that texture. Click on the number and enable ‘Single User’. You can then edit that instance of the texture without changing any others.
1: Making one of your first posts a combination rant/beg for help/MAX IS BETTER says something about you. Not sure what, but it sure says something.
2: Second result upon Googling “blender multiple material tutorial” is: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Multiple_Materials
3: It’s probably best to understand the basic underlying concepts of a piece of complex software you’re trying to learn before you use it. You’ll be much better at it.
4: The above doc is for pre-2.5 versions. 2.5 is Alpha, so you shouldn’t expect to find lots of docs and tutorials lying around. Try finding tutorials for a pre-Alpha version of MAX. That said, the doc linked above explains the concepts quite well. You should have no problems mapping what you read there to 2.5.
Thanks for the link but it doesnt explain at all why new material should automaticly be linked by the one you just created. I actually work already in the game industry and blender (the little that i know) is more then enought to do what i want. Maybe my tone was a bit angry and i am sorry if i upset your feelings in some way. I honestly think that the material managment in blender is stupid. Yes 2.5 is an alpha but if the staff from Blender highlight a new feature called “toolbar” in their new version i expect it to work thats all. If i create a new material there is a reason thatits called “new”, if it isnt why not just call it copy ?
I’m not upset. You were just being rude. You still are (i.e. “material management is stupid.”).
The concept you’re missing is that the “+” button does not “create a new material”. If you hover your mouse over the button, you’ll see that the tooltip reads “Add a new material slot or duplicate the selected one.” If you already have a material on your object, it will be selected. Therefore, clicking the “+” button duplicates it. As advertised.
You duplicate, then you can either make that material single user to edit it in place, or simply link it to a different already existing material via the datablock control.
Alpha means:
This software should be used by people with extreme fault tolerance.
This software should be used by people who already know what they’re doing.
This software should be used by people who know how to read instructions.
It most distinctly does not mean that it should do things how you think they should be done, and is under no obligation to you or anyone else to do so. Anything can change with an Alpha at any time. Nothing is guaranteed to work, and in fact many pieces will not work, because they are under development.
ok ok ok guys … don’t get all riled up here
blenders material system isn’t all that intuitive for folks coming from other apps. that’s fairly well known i think. but it is just as powerful, especially when nodes get thrown into the equation. just takes some getting used to is all. @jimpaw::
when you press ‘add new’ material, you are essentially creating a full copy of the material that was selected when you pressed ‘add new’, including all textures, settings etc … this IS nice, if that’s what you want, but can be confusing if you don’t understand blender’s workflow. it just takes some getting used to.
so you ‘add new’ material, you’ve got a LINKED copy of the texture from the original material. go into the texture slots, and delete the linked texture, then add a new one. DON’T just change the linked texture. or, as harkeyman said, click the ‘make single user’ button to turn the link into a new texture. then you’re free to change the texture as needed without altering the original material.
did that make sense? the wiki for 2.49 explains how this works in much greater detail, although the specifics of doing it in 2.5 are rather different. perhaps if you are a completely new blender user, you should use the 2.49b release instead of 2.5, because, as harkeyman said, 2.5 is in alpha, and is in release only so that the community can use it and test it to work the bugs out. It’s a complete re-coding from scratch of the previous versions to make the code more stable and easily expandable. In many regards. 2.49b is more functional (i.e. - less crashy and the features are all there, except the newest ones like smoke, volumetrics, et al) and is MUCH better documented at this point. The wiki manual will be able to help you a LOT more if you use 2.49b.
hope i’m helping, and not just blasting oxygen into the fire
Thanks alot for a friendly answer. I only use 2.49 b at the moment,i
have just downloaded 2.5 1 for quick tryout. Its been years since i
used 3dsmax but the material editor there are really easy to
understand. I love blender,but the material part i think is really
illusive. I have just started to do some work for the gaming
industry and when you are on deadlines things like that can be very
frustrating. Its not that i am trying to say that blender is crap,but i find that blender
trying to marketing itself as being smart and as i wrote before i
find it very hard to understand what the benefit is of linking
textures from material just becouse you pres"add new" button. If i
am working on an entire scene i think the most natural workflow is
to create a house texture,leaf texture and so on. seems strange that
blender takes it for granted that i whould want to link and copy
textures + forces me to press more buttons to really make it a new material.it just isnt logical. Thanks alot for the help, is it easier in blender 2.5 a 1 ?
well … I’d have to agree that it IS rather unintuitive to work that way, and it took me awhile to get used to. But to be fair, you’d have to click buttons to add a new texture and alter your material settings anyhow, so it’s really not much extra ‘work’, just clicking the ‘make single user’ button really. You’ll get used to it, in time, and/or they’ll change the default behaviour …
Blend On!!!
… and oh yeah, no it’s no different in the alpha yet … plus the settings are in a different place, but better and more sensibly organized …
The materials system could be alot more comprehensive than it is. Seems far too much opportunity for confusion. It is quite weird and hard to understand. It is free to use though so best just to try and learn it - although it certainly isn’t easy.
Perhaps future versions will re-write this to make it more user friendly. At the moment it’s too hard to track what the hell’s going on. Perhaps a simpler version for less gifted users might make alot of difference.
It works fine for me I just click “Add New” each time and I get a new material.
If you find that materials are being linked and you don’t want that. Just click the little number that appears next to the material name in the F5 material context. That number is actually telling you how many datablocks are sharing that material. If you click the number a little message will appear “Ok? Single User”. Click on that and the material becomes unique.
you only get a blank material on a different object. Same object duplicated the material already selected.
I’ve played with the nodes & that seems like a relatively more logical way to do it, but since I do most of my material work outside of blender (for games), I just use the basic stuff.
