Linked Objects with Unique Materials

I have a model of an aircraft that is textured with markings of number “123”. I want to render a scene with 3 of these aircraft flying in formation with unique textures and marking number…but I only want to use one model.

I am able to create a new scene and get the model object to link to the original (without duplicating the model object)…I can scale, move, etc the linked object so it’s in a different position from the original object in the original scene. But I want to be able to apply unique textures and marking numbers to the linked object, while keeping the model/mesh as a link (rather than a duplicated copy). On the linked linked object I have tried to Make Single User on the Materials, but they seem to stay linked to the original object.

Is there anyway to do this? I am using Blender 2.54.

You can do this in Blender. By default, blender assigns materials to the mesh. But you can override this and assign the material to the object. This means the objects can share the mesh and still have unique materials applied to each one.

In 2.5 click the material tab and you will see a little drop down that says “dat” or “Data”. Click that and change it to “Object”. Now you can assign the material to the object instead of the mesh or “Data Block”.

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Whoo Hoo - worked like a charm - Thanks Atom!

10 years on, and this still works… or should I say… 10 years on, and this still hasn’t been made more obvious. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m really struggling with this. I think I’m trying to do the same thing but no joy.
I have “duplicate linked” a scene. I want the background object in one scene to be white and one to be black. Should be able to library override the background object and assign a different material? Just cannot get it to work!

Any thoughts? I’m using 2.92