• Zaxwerks

  Materials confusion

  Posted by Roger Burton on July 21, 2012 at 7:39 am

  Sorry I seem to be filling the forum at the moment, I’m a little confused ref. materials workflow. I have duplicated a material in the ‘swatches’ window renamed it ‘logo’, changed it a little and dragged it onto my object.

  I then click on the object, and the material appears in the ‘Material Docks’, if I d/click that material and another version of that ‘logo’ material appears (in the ‘Material Docks’) with a .2 appended, (I clicked around a bit and have another … logo.4) so what material IS applied to the object ? logo or logo.2 or logo.4 and do I need to get logo .2 or .4 into the material editor window to tweak the colour … and what are these extra swatches logo.2 or logo.4 confused … advice please.

  Roger

  Edward Wu replied 13 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Matt Rhodes

  July 23, 2012 at 4:42 pm

  Hi Roger.

  When you drag a material onto an object, a copy of that material gets applied.
  This prevents users from modifying the master swatch materials by accident.

  If you’d like to apply a swatch without making a copy, hold
  the Option key (or Alt key on Windows) while dragging the material onto the object.
  Then, if you modify the material, the material in the swatch bin will be updated as well.

  Let us know if you have more questions.

  Matt Rhodes
  Zaxwerks, Inc.
• 

  Roger Burton

  July 23, 2012 at 6:14 pm

  Thanks Matt … that’s the source of my confusion, I’ve been duplicating the material in order to ‘protect’ the original swatch, I’ll stop doing that and start to rename the dupe that Invig generates … my aim is to create one ‘material’ mess with it’s transparency, reflectivity etc (I’m attempting to make a glass-like material that will allow me to get some nice lighting effects through and reflected off the objects, is this possible)? and then dupe the material six times to be able to apply it to six objects and alter their individual colours, am I going about it the correct way ?

  Thanks again Roger
• 

  Edward Wu

  July 23, 2012 at 10:45 pm

  Hi Roger,

  If you want to keep editing a material to see the changes, the best thing to do is to drag and drop a material onto an object. This copies the swatch and applies it onto the object as Matt described. Then, go into the Materials Dock panel and double click the Material shown in the Dock. This will load the Material in the Material Dock into the Material Editor. Then, as you make changes in the Material Editor, you will see the object update with each update.

  Hope this helps with what you’re doing.

  Best,
  Edward

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