purging materials

Support Materials and Textures
1

in sketchup one can easily remove materials that have been previously used in the model but are now no longer presently on any faces by purging the materials with about 1 click in the materials/ colours pop up box. is there a way to do this in blender, i’ve found myself with far more materials than i need some of which i used earlier during modelling. is there a one or two click procedure that will let me remove all the materials that are NOT used on any faces in the model. i really cannot go through the materials deleting them one by one, if that is possible, as there are over 100 of them becuse i have replaced one material with another several times. the huge list of unused materials shows when i click on the “up down” arrow symbol next to the material name when in the material tab of the properties panel.
please explain what to do.
thanks

as a second question:
i have about 50 objects in the model all derived from splitting up an initially imported single object. hence the 50 objects all have every material anywhere in the model in their material tabs when selecting the relevant object. is there a way to remove the materials from objects on which they are not used but leave their instance on other objects unaltered. this too would need to be done with a few clicks as added up if i had to remove each material from each object where it was unwelcome i would also have hundreds of steps required.

2

If the material is not assigned to an object and does not have a fake user, save the blend, close, reopen. Materials with no users are removed upon the closing of blender.

Edit: Nevermind, before you made an edit it sounded like these weren’t attached to objects. Reading comprehension fail on my part :stuck_out_tongue:

3

how do i eliminate all fake users on materials then? closing and reopening worked on a proportion fo the stuff
thanks for such prompt responses

4

Do those remaining materials have an ‘F’ beside them in the material browse list on an object? If they do, then they have fake users. If it has a number >0 instead of an F, it’s still assigned to an object.

In the outliner, change the filter to ‘Blender File’. Find ‘materials’ category, then right click then press C on each one. I haven’t figured out a batch way to do this, though. If you are fast with your fingers it shouldn’t take too long ;p

http://oi59.tinypic.com/xd70yf.jpg

5

May be you are talking about Material Utils addon? It has Clean Materials, which cleans unused materials from object (ones not assigned to any face): http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/Materials_Utils