Save a label

[mattjgerard]

I've finally gotten a good water drop wet look using labels in the material, and seeing as I have an entire machine that I need to cover with water drops/stains, and the machine has many different materials already prebuilt, is there a way to save a label prebuilt that I can just apply to any material? Using the poliigon textures there is much tweaking of brightness and contrast numbers that I have to do to get the look right, but I'd rather not have to rebuilt the label from scratch each time! I see 2 options-

1) Rebuild the label and just get really fast at it

2) Apply the same material that includes the label to everything, then re-apply the original materials whist holding the CTRL key to retain the labels. I think this might be my best options, but many of the materials have been tweaked as well, but I can go through and save each of those as an individual material saving me time when I re-apply it.

Are there any other options I'm missing?

[richardfunnell]

Sure, you can draw a selection box around your label/nodes in the material graph by holding shift, then copy the selection.
Open up your other material's material graph and paste it in.

Depending on the label's material type, you can also recreate just the label as a parent material, save it to your library and then drag and drop it onto the labels list of another material.

[mattjgerard]

Good to know it can do that, I didn't know you could copy and paste that stuff in the MatGraph. I tried making a Label material for my water spots and streaks overlay/label, but I must not have saved it right, when I dragged it into the label window all the textures were stripped off and defaulted to the standard grey diffuse without any textures or labels.

I'll keep working on it, if I can get this to work it will save me a ton of time.

THanks!

matt

[mattjgerard]

OK, time to revisit this. We are trying to create internal libraries of sticker labels for all of our products, and I see that the KS logos are stored inthe Textures library under labels.

Is there a way to save these label presets? If I create a black plastic material with a label, can I just save the label to the textures library with all its mapping, opacity, position and scaling in tact?

Or do I need to save it as a material, then apply that material as a label in the mat graph somehow? We have different base materials that our products can be depending on the use, Black plastic for standard, grey plastic for FDA approved uses, etc, so being able to just save the label part of the material separately would be awesome.

[DriesV]

Hi Matt,

The Labels folder in Textures contains just that, textures.
Yes, you can save out Labels to separate materials and then reuse them as Labels in other projects.
We do currently not have a workflow to directly save Labels (or any sub graph really) to the Library. A workaround is to delete all nodes but anything connected to the Label from the Material Graph, and then save that material to the Library. A Label is just a layered material anyway. A nice solution is to make a Labels folder in the Material Library and collect everything there. Nice and tidy.

To reuse a material as a Label, simply open the Material Graph, drag in a material from the Library and connect it to the base material.
Boom! You just reused a material as a Label.

Dries

[mattjgerard]

That's what I will do then, just think of them as materials. I can do that. I don't care what tab they are stored under, just as long as I can save them and allow the other artist I work with to have access to them to provide consistency between our workflow and renders. The less setup needed on repetitive things like product labels, stickers and logos the better my day goes. I will be testing this out next week, and I'll post my results as I figure it out.

Thanks!