is it possible to have instanced materials throughout a daz scene?

andy vron

im mainly a 3dsmax user where we have a material library and any changes made in that library will be reflected immedaitely throught the scene..

im bring a model across from max....unless im missing something it seems like even though materials in a daz scene can have the same name across different objects they are in fact totally independent.

i cant even select all the surfaces with the same named material across many objects since it only works on one at a time.

this seems quite dificult if your working on a large architectural scene that is split up into different sections but using a common set of materials.

any ideas guys on how to do this without laboriously applying the same material to different objects whenever i tweak a material??

andy vron

its ok ...i think ive figured it out ...merge preset materials into the scene...but this does seem like a pretty crude way of doing it..

SimonJM

There are various 'multi-seclet' options available in the Surfaces tab.  If you right-click on a surafce on a figure/prop it will open a pop-ip menu with a variety of 'select all with this ...', where 'this' can be a map of some name, a parameter of some value, a shader of this type, etc.

andy vron

andy vron said:

 

SimonJM said:

There are various 'multi-seclet' options available in the Surfaces tab.  If you right-click on a surafce on a figure/prop it will open a pop-ip menu with a variety of 'select all with this ...', where 'this' can be a map of some name, a parameter of some value, a shader of this type, etc.

i was using that right click menu which seems promising.... but even though I had highlighted many scene items to start off with it would always lose that selection and only highlight within the object that I hit first when I try to confirm the selection...which defeats the idea of globally re-applying materials.

i had this idea of having one dummy object which contained every material in the scene....I could just edit that objects materials ....save to material preset...highlight all objects in scene and then apply material preset so that all model is now having the latest material definitions....im not at my machine right now but I think that idea should work but I can't help thinking that I must be doing this the hard way........  in max it's easy as the same name means if you make the material a purple colour on one surface then all surfaces with that name throughout the model will turn purple....daz doesn't do this.

 

andy vron

ok thanks ..seem to have found the right click any object option...