Linking Surface Materials / Shader Settings

NA_1234

Hi there!

I'm a new DAZ Studio user (but experienced blender user) and this is a fundamental question about its workflow ...

I'm building my first DAZ scene mainly from architectural elements that i designed in Blender (want to add DAZ characters later). Importing, organizing and placing the Objects in my scene was rather easy, so far so good ...

Problems appear with materials/shaders. Of course i have to re-make my materials and decided to go with Iray shaders. Ok, I do that for one object (e.g a wall section) and when i'm happy with it, I have to transfer the material/shader setting to all of the other objects that share the same surface type (same surface name!). I know that I can save shader presets and then apply them to all relevant surfaces, but i have to re-do that every time I make a change (which happens a lot during a creative process...).

THIS IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE WORKFLOW !

Is there any way to link surface materials/shaders in Daz Studio (maybe with a paid addon)? E.g. all surfaces that share the same name on 100 different objects share the same material/shader settings (point to the same data block). This means editing one will automatically edit all of them always. This is what you get in blender by default and its what makes sense. At least it should be possible to group surfaces somehow for easy re-selection (not objects, but the surfaces on different objects).

If this can absolutely not be done in Daz Studio, i can never be happy with it.

Thank you very much in advance for taking the time to read my first post and help me :)

 

Richard Haseltine

There used to be a script, included with one of the poseWorks shaders for 3delight I think, but I'm not sure if it is still available (or would still work - it may have been DS 2 in which case it would need to survive the transition from Daz Script to Daz Script 2). That said, it should be possible to write a script that would update all surfaces with the same tag as the selected surface to use the same settings - probably a modified version of http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/material/deep_copy/start , perhaps combined with the tag-handling from http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/material/select_by_tag/start

NA_1234

Thanks for the tip.

Maybe i'll look into writing my own script for that. Still hoping that there is some finished product, that i can just use... Somehow its unbelievable for me that this is not integrated into DS, people must have that problem all the time.

But after a lot of googling and your answer i think i can be pretty sure there is no hidden feature i overlooked.

Thanks !