Universal Colour Shader -- possible?

greywolf

[Sorry if this is the wrong arena; please shift it if so.  I'm not sure what the right one is.]

Hello, dear collective,

I was spending quite a bit of time creating colour-only shaders for a garment, and got to thinking that creating this array of colours for each piece of clothing (Material Settings) was tedious; I abandoned the idea of trying to create them as Shaders or Shader settings because that requires me to save one shader per surface group, which was going to be multiply tedious.  I did manage to come up with the right keystrokes to avoid excessive point-click-open-point-click-open-select-or-deselect mouse moves [that I can't manage this with key mappings is an annoyance for a totally different day], so that saved my aching hand.

What I'm getting at:  Is there a way to have one set of colour materials/shaders [per rendering engine -- I know about RSL vs MDL and that the qualities of colour differ] such that I would be able to drag the colour and apply it to (almost) any surface?  I'm only modifying the diffuse colour out of all the properties that are there.

I have other materials that modify sheerness, fit, etc. but I recognise that I'd have to recreate those per item, but it seems that modifying Diffuse Color, in general, should be more readily possible than it is.

Also, when I save my items, they are handily tagged as [Material], which is great -- How do I get to indicate MDL or RSL, or is that put into a custom image per?

Richard Haseltine

A Shader preset will apply to any selected surface(s) on any selected model(s) - you need just one per set of settings, you don't need to save for each surface is they use the same values.

greywolf

...That's kind of how I was hoping it would work but I don't find that it does -- many times I apply a shader to a surface, or so I think, and nothing happens.

 

 

Gordig

You need to have surface(s) selected in the Surfaces pane to apply shader presets.

greywolf

Gordig said:

You need to have surface(s) selected in the Surfaces pane to apply shader presets.

...won't dragging and 'Apply to...' do the same?