[Bf-funboard] Materials

[Robert Wenzlaff]

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 06:59, Konrad Haenel wrote:
> I really wonder what's wrong with simply using any .blend-file as your
> personal storage for materials. All you have to do than is append some
> material from that file to your current scene. How much easier could it
> become? You can even make little cute scenes which show off the
> materials on some spheres for quick reference (I do that, it's very
> helpful).

Workflow.

Append->File->Material->Gold<enter>
Select_object->material->gold

as opposed to

Select_object->material->(Lib?)->gold

The (Lib?) indicates a seperate step that might be involved in selecting a 
Library material as opposed to a local one.

If they were in the B.Blend, then they would just be in the Materials list 
(with fake users so they never purge), but then every library material 
becomes copied to every .blend you make.

Plus neither method allows a heirarchy of materials (Material->Metal->Gold),  
If you want 200 stock materials, they all just get dumped in an alphebetical 
list (well, you could put all the metals in one .blend though, and sorta' do 
this).  If you have the Blender texture CD, think about how useless it would 
be if all the materials were just dumped in the same directory.

The easiest way would be to include "Add Library" next to "Add New" (maybe 
change that to "Add Default", and the texture menu then allows you to browse 
a library (maybe use the Blender Texture CD as an example structure).  When 
you select one, it appends it to the file and selects it for the current 
object...  


-- 
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Why can't life be as easy as second-order homogeneous
 differential equations with constant coefficients?
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Robert Wenzlaff        rwenzlaff at soylent-green.con