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  • Published 30 Mar 2026

Improved material creation and application UI UX

Hello I'd love to see some improvements in the Native Blender material UI UX.

these are the features I hate about vanilla Blender:

-not possible to create material without applying them to an object

-not possible to erase materials easily

-material not applied disappears if fake user is not applied

-assign material to multiple objects shouldn't be that complicated

-no native proper triplanar mapping supported

I'm an educator and all these aspects really scare newcomers.

In particular triplanar mapping should be applied as a modifier, I'm impatiently waiting to find a Geonode worflow to apply a proper triplanar mapping via modifier, unfortunatelly it's not possible yet with the current nodes (I guess), so I implemented it via shader editor in the plugin below, I've found an ok method which allows to still work only on one shader without needing to transfer the changes on 3 textures individually (I've used instanced groups, but it's not ideal)

In the mean time I've created a plugin that you can download for free from my github page to implement most of the features I'd like to have, find it here: github.com/Riccardo-Foschi/Blender-EasyMAT

in the read me you can also find a video tutorial (10min) where I show the main features.

the plugin adds a side bar panel in the shader editor windows, called EasyMAT and two button in the top bar of the shader editor for redundancy, ease of use and simplify its finding.

I really hope that these ideas will be considered by some of the blender developers to see them implemented natively, this would also add a lot to the usability and ease of use for newcomers!

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Development Status: Open

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rikkarlo
30 Mar 2026

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