Browsing Materials/Textures

Support Basics & Interface
1

Odd question:

Is there a way to brows/edit materials and textures without assigning them to objects?

See, I’ve got a very complex scene, and many materials that are only assigned to one mesh or other… picking the correct mesh to tweak the exact texture or material can be a real pain, especially when I want to make a series of subtle changes to several materials.

What I have been doing as a work-around is adding a spare cube on a hidden layer and just assigning it whatever material I want to work on, but that seems a rather inelegant solution.

Could we have (or maybe there already is) a new window type (a la 3d-view, IPO, etc) that is a shader browser that lets one select and edit materials and textures without assigning them to objects (or GAH! changing their assignment, which I have done inadvertantly many a time)?

2

I use one method to do this:-

Add a plane out of camera shot and out of the way of your main meshes. Then select the materials using this plane to select them from the mat list. This way when you change/tweak the mat settings, they are changed for the whole scene.

Hope this helps,

Sonix.

3

In the OOPs window:

RMB (or Shft-RMB) the object(s) to see which material it is linked to.
If it has more than one material linked Ctrl-RMB the material tag and look in the material buttons at the datablock.

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