Select by material

Select by material

A function that would allow you to make polygon selections by material assignment would be very useful. For instance select all polygons of material typeX.

I am trying to export obj's into Nuke which doesn't have great material support but can easily import a number of obj files and assign each a unique material.

Another example would be to break up a mesh which has a number of unique materials into an defferent meshes for each and export as an fbx. I could then import each section of the fbx and similarly assign a separate material.
 
Yes the polygon selection method seems to work fine within a particular mesh...

However... I'm trying to separate the various materials out of a model that is made up of numerous meshes, each has materials scattered amongst their individual polygon selection variables but not necessarily always the same (eg. "darkmetal" is polygon selection 3 in some and 5 in others).

It can get complicated very quickly and when editing models that come from external sources (like SketchUp warehouse) it's not always set up the most logically, especially like Cheetah 3D wants.

The simple solution (from a users perspective) would be to add a selection criterion based on which material is assigned.

Select all polygons of material type "darkmetal" for instance.
 
I too would like to select all polygons with a certain material. I am trying to reduce the number of materials used in several imported models (lots of duplicate materials) and am looking for a way to "merge" identical materials. Ideally, I would simply select two or more materials and say "merge". The result would be all objects containing those materials would now share one material.
 
What would be really nice is if you could simply select materials in the material browser and merge them (perhaps the first selected would become the new "master")

It would also be nice if you could tell which materials were used in a scene (e.g. after merging materials you could then clean up).

And finally if you could drag a material onto another material it would replace the second material in the scene.
 
What would be really nice is if you could simply select materials in the material browser and merge them (perhaps the first selected would become the new "master")

It would also be nice if you could tell which materials were used in a scene (e.g. after merging materials you could then clean up).

And finally if you could drag a material onto another material it would replace the second material in the scene.

These are all features I am used to in Adobe Illustrator. I did find the "Delete Unused" by right clicking in the Materials panel, but I would rather they were highlighted instead of being automatically deleted. Then I could control the purge.

Edit:
I have just looked at Cinema 4D Lite (Ships with Adobe Creative Cloud After Effects). It works this way as well, making merging materials a snap.
 
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Hi,

I think to start with there could be a "Shader Selection" (restricted to face selection mode) similar to the "Group Selection" in the Selection menu. Then when clicking on a face it selects all faces sharing the same material assignment.

How would that be?

Regards.
 
This feature could really benefit from being a bit more prominent within the user interface:

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Still not getting it. Sorry. Polygon selection is not selected the obis selected.I thought if polygon selection was chosen it would be selected, I'm missing something here.
 

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You don´t need to touch "polygon-selection": Cheetah3d will assign a N° automatically. If you need to change a material completely and want to assign a new one you can do do by adding this to the mesh - and selecting the wanted polygon selection.
Maybe this GIF will help to illustrate this:

Cheers
Frank
 

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What would be really nice is if you could simply select materials in the material browser and merge them (perhaps the first selected would become the new "master")

It would also be nice if you could tell which materials were used in a scene (e.g. after merging materials you could then clean up).

And finally if you could drag a material onto another material it would replace the second material in the scene.

This would be so useful.
Another very similar approach could be contextual menu option 'delete & replace with ... (another material)' function.

--shift studio.
 
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