Merge Materials from Two Different Blend Files?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi,

Is there a way to merge materials in two different blend files?
The situtation is in

  1. Blend File #1 has updated geo and outdated material
  2. Blend File #2 has outdated geo and updated material.

I want to merge both of the materials. Both files have the same material name.
I can’t directly import them since it the other material will just be named with 001 suffix and I’ll to reassign materials to objects.

Is there a better way of doing this?

2

There is a way to do this using the Python console, but the easiest way may be to take the steps you just described. You can speed up the process by selecting multiple objects and hitting [Ctrl + L > Materials] to copy the material assignment of the active object to all the other selected objects.

3

In a 3rd file:
Append just the materials from the file with correct materials
then append the objects from the correct geo file

your geo will now have materials with ‘whatever.001’ but the correct ‘whatever’ material will also be in the file.
enable ‘Material Utils’ in addons.
press shift+Q and choose ‘Specials>Merge base names’
pick ‘Auto rename/replace’
Done.
Any material with .001 will be replaced with its non .001 equivalent and since you appended the correct materials first it will be those.