ok this is an issue that i regularly find in blender that bugs the hell out of me.
i have all my buildings seperated into seperate files for modeling and texturing, then i am creating a city and want to append them all into one file.
HOWEVER the materials get duplicated so now i have 7 of the same material for no reason.
i would like to select all the objects of a certain material and convert them to another material so i can converge all of them into a single data block.
the thing is i have this problem repeated hundreds of times with different textures. and there isn’t much i can do about it.
I doesn’t get duplicate for no reason, there’s a very good reason to it.
First, it only create duplicates of a material if you don’t append them at once (to append more than one object at once, highlight them in the list by right clicking). It creates duplicate because, it would be really hard to know if both materials, even if they are named the save are really the same.
Second, it’s very easy to apply a material to many object at once.
Assign it to an object
Select all the other objects you want to assign it too.
Reselect the first object to make it the Active Object (bright pink)
Select the Make Links entry in the second Object submenu in the spacebar menu (or just Ctrl-L)
I’ve never been in this position but I’d append all the materials into a 3rd party file (materails.blend) roof, gutter, brick, glass etc, each onto a seperate dummy object. Then delete all materials in the one with the duplicate materials, save/load save/load to get rid of them, then append from materials.blend and multiple assign them where they finally belong. But that’s just a guess.
