A Better Way to Assign Material: The "Paint Bucket"
Hello the way we assign material in blender is quite unusual, let me present you the bucket tool from sketchup, we could easely integrate him into the blender active tools system, or a standart operator, with a little icon in the material tab to activate it
the tool is simple, you select a material, you click click click (steps: selecting the material in the material slot, click, click)
we have at our disposal an eye dropper, hit alt and click and the material is now the active one and will be assigned next click
hitting ctrl click would attribute the material to the whole island
and finally shift clicking would replace the old material to the new one
and of course attribute the paint to the selection
5 Comments
Wouldn't it be easier to just have a hotkey for material asignment of the current selection? Selecting faces, either single or connected, is easy and fast enough. From there on out it would just be an additional buttonpress.
This also feels like it would be an easy thing to do if macro recording and menu customization was easier to everybody, even without scripting capabilities.
For example: In Modo I am using material assignments for polyselections super frequently in aproject. So I created a radial menue with three color presets in this case.
The macro creates a material if it's not yet present in the library, otherwise it assigns the already created material to the selection (polyselection in edit mode or whole object in object mode). Modo makes this a little easier than Blender, though, as the material assignments are already setup that way:
That's essentially the paintbucket functionality but in a more general/broader usage sense and without an extra tool.
I could maybe see this as an extension of vertex painting (an interface for the Set Vertex Colors operation when face selection is active)... but I wouldn't want to use this for material assignment.
I think a better way would be to use a mask system, assign the material by selecting faces, linked faces and uv islands
I really miss 3DsMAX style option to assign material from shader editor to viewport by drag'n'drop.
I dunno, I like it as an accessibility option- but it just seems like unnecessary extra clicks and moving around the viewport to me. Currently you select your geo, then from the same panel click your material and then "assign". Everything happens in the material panel so it's in close proximity and efficient.
For what you're proposing you would need to first be in some sort of paint bucket tool, then select the geo, then select the material from the property panel, then go back to the geo and click it to apply. I think if it was paired with some sort of intuitive material palette rather than the existing workflow it might be more intriguing?