Question about Procedural material asset library and changes

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi. Say i make an asset library. Lets say concrete is the Procedural material i choose for a project.

now, for my current project if i decide to use a lighter or a darker shade of concrete while using the same node structure, or say i make any changes to the material for that project, does it change or override whats already present in the asset library?

basically do i need to stick to the one in the library i made or i can make changes to it in a particular project using it, without that changing the one in the library?

2

Hello !

By default blender doesn’t write to external files.
That means that unless you use specifics addons your asset library will never be changed if you’re on another file.

There are 3 different behavior that you can choose when importing an asset with asset browser :
Link
Append
Append & Reuse data (by default)

By default , the data (your material) is imported once, then if you drop again the same material from the asset browser on another object, blender will look if the material is already imported in the scene and use that one, instead of re-importing it a second time and create a Material.001 and so forth.

So by default, if you change a color on your material, and drop it again you may get the impression that the original is changed. But that’s only because it’s reused from your working file.

You can then rename your material in your working file, and IIRC blender will then import a new one when you drop that concrete material on another object.

Or you can use the Append behavior, which is a bit cumbersome. Every time you’ll drop a material from the asset browser it will create a copy, so you’ll get concrete .001 .002 .003 material which is quite inefficient especially if they are similar.

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3

Also note: if your materials have nested / grouped nodes, you’ll have to manually rename them too (group.01, group.02, etc);
if you don’t they will be shared 1:1 between your imported materials, and a change to one will affect all the others.

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4

So say I have a rock material. And I want it to have two different colors on the two different meshes.

Append reuse will make them the same.

Should I go just append so that I can change the color in one and gave it not affect the other one?

@sozap

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5

That’s really up to you !

switching to append only will do for sure !
Probably I’d stick to Append and reuse, and make a duplicate of the material I’d like to change.
But, that led to the exact same result. Probably depending on the case I’ll choose Append, if I need a great bunch of copy of the same materials.

Maybe do some simple tests so you are confident on how this works and then you’ll chose the approach that you like more !