I’ve been poking at this for awhile now, and I think I got it to work once, more or less by accident, but I’d like to understand what’s going on.
I’m modeling a series of objects which differ only in an image texture that’s meant to be different for each one.
So I have an object with two vertex groups and materials assigned to each. One is just a plain material, the other has an image texture.
Obviously, it’s easy to use “Shift+D” to duplicate the model. When I do that, the datablocks (materials and textures) are shared.
For the next step, I want to COPY the texture for the image vertex group and then change the image.
But I don’t know how to do that – or I don’t know the “right” way to do it, and I think I’m fiddling with a lot of things that don’t need to be changed.
On the Material control panel, the “X” says it “unlinks” the material – but I think this is basically the same as deleting, isn’t it?
The “+” says to make a new material, which normally does copy the material – but actually what happens is that it makes a new material which then gets assigned to the same vertex group and material slot for each object.
There’s a “Make Local…” and “Make Local with Datablocks” item on the object menu – but I think that’s for bringing linked data from other Blend files into my current Blend file.
Then there’s a selector which allows me to choose “Data” or “Object”. I understand that Blender has a concept of assigning textures to the object or to the mesh contained in the object – but I really don’t understand why that distinction is useful, and it doesn’t seem to affect this.
I figured that looking at the Outliner view would clear this up – but it’s just as confusing to me:
Note how there ARE (apparently) separate materials and separate textures – but changing the image for one changes both.
The only thing there that looks useful is “Make Single User” (maybe?) but actually clicking it gives me an error message: “Not Yet!” (I guess this is a new feature not in 2.63 yet? Still not sure if it’s what I want anyway).
Surely there’s an easy way to do this?
Check your material list. You’ll see a number next to the name. Click here to make your material single user.