Change default new material name to object name instead
Something small, but instead of naming everything Material, Material_001, Material_002, etc, why don't we name it using the object name instead? When a lot of objects have unique materials, a lot of the time you just name them after the object like the "character," object would have "character_mat," or whatever.
I understand that a lot of the time if a user doesn't care to be organized they will still end up as "Cube.001_mat," "Sphere.005_mat," etc, but to me it just makes more sense as a default. People who aren't going to rename their materials don't really care what they are named anyways, and those who do have probably either already named the objects that they are going to be creating the material for (saving them a step), or are going to change the material's name anyways.
3 Comments
This sounds more like something blender should allow users to control. Maybe it would work better as an addon as this adds something that for most people may not be that important. Asset naming conventions are important part of game dev process and as such it would be useful if blender had option to change the defaults for how new objects, duplicates, materials, rigs are named. For example new material should always be mat_NAME_## where ## is 00, 01, 02 and so forth (not .001, .002 etc.).
My issue at this time on the naming convention in the . (dot) vs the _ (underscore). I have had to rename render files when going to other programs downstream of the workflow. As the other programs reads that as an file extension. Would love to have the open to change to an underscore naming chain.
Changing names would not work well for everyone. Maybe if you suggested something like additional labels for materials, it would be different and if it were optional. The problem would be, for example, when exporting materials or planning a database from a given project. You would then have material names with object names. There could be an option where blender would add an additional lebel to the names of materials assigned to specific object. Someone would have to program it. So the names of the materials would not change but display additional information and you could search for the material through these additional labels. The lebels could be displayed in the name of the material after the characters _ # or something similar. For example, for an object called "table" material X would get an additional label after the characters "_ #": "material X_ #table".