Material Slot Names!
This is something I miss a lot: the ability to give a name to material slots.</br> As shown in the picture:</br>
- column for slot's names
- material name (as now)
- resizable vertical boundary
- when I add a new material the slot name is empty: everything is like now, there's only the added optional chance to add a string. So, instead of Slot 1, Slot 2, Slot 3... Blender will show something human-readable.
Now for the long explanation, I think it's better to make a (real) example to explain the necessity.</br> Say I have a big sofa, where big cushions and armrests are leather X, the back is inner half cotton, outer half leather Y. I choose portions of the mesh and assign the requested material, then wood for the legs, and another material for stitching threads. Everything fine. But then The client says "Hey I want to see my product in this other version, where everything is black leather". Now I assign black leather to all previous groups, and end with 4 duplicates material slots. The next time I need to assign different materials to the parts (if i start again from the black version) I won't know what material is what.</br></br>
7 Comments
Yes I really hope to set each material slot as different name. I requested almost same thing longtime. (in blender dev talk too) I still hope, many blender user notice the importance.
We set name for Object and mesh-data individually. Then I suppose most of blender user notice it is logical. But when we talk about material-slots and material, blender user not request developer to set different name. (actually there is no way to assin material-slot name in bpy too)
I really hope, blender user request it and ask devteam to consider it
devtalk.blender.org/t/can-i-ask-developers-about-material-slot-of-blender/3045/3
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/T4bbbc/
I think my presentatin failed, so hope other users request it well.
Looks very useful. I had a lot of times when I should click each material to detect what set of polygons it belongs. It's a good idea for an addon at least.
Appendix: in the shader editor there's a duplicated menu, and this feature proposal would clean it up: one single menu with 'Slot name + Material name'</br>
* @ Lsscpp * +1
* @ Lsscpp * where did you found such duplicate? I haven`t such problem. SlotNames — yes, because it is more like for part of mesh. not for material as is.
* @ Vyacheslav * oh, maybe it's Amaranth addon... sorry
I don't oppose this proposal especially after reading lsscpp's comment about that duplicate menu.
However even if this feature existed I'd probably still prefer to just keep each part of the model as separate object. I've downloaded many couches from various places and the vast majority of the time they are separate objects for cushions, stitchings, buttons, legs, etc. IF there was a situation where I had a single mesh and wanted variations I'd use Blender's ability to duplicate the object while re-using the same mesh data and assigning materials at the object level. You'd have the same number of slots on each object and each slot would be assigned to the same faces but within each slot on each object you can put different materials.
Another way of solving this problem could be to give materials a way to access the different vertex groups or face maps defined on the mesh as use them as a mask. A vertex group for just the buttons, just the legs, just the stitching, just the cushions etc could all be utilized in a single material to define the entire look of the mesh. In a duplicate object, again sharing the same mesh to save on file size, a single material can define a whole different look via vertex groups.
My idea can probably be achieved with vertex colors but assigning them is so much more work then making vertex groups or face maps.
It can also be done via multiple UV maps where the intended target of each named part of the model is placed within 0-1 space of the uv map and all other parts are placed in a negative area. Again this is just so much more work than defining the different parts as vertex groups or face maps.
This ties into another proposal posted recently that suggests vertex groups should be created automatically when mesh objects are joined together.