link materials, not labels?

[andy.engelkemier]

I'm attempting to make my life a bit easier, but so far I keep hitting walls.

I have a product that is broken up into a bunch of parts (duh, the usual right?) many of which have some screen printing on them for indications and logos.
Well, that's all the same material. So I really would like the material to be linked. But I can't figure out how to build that.

Linking with multi-material links which material is selected, so that idea was a bust.
I also tried dragging in the non-labeled material into the material node editor. It came in nicely, but sadly, no link.

So if someone comes and says, "Oh, hey, this needs to be this new color, change the texture to something more like moldtech 11010, and we changed material type, so the IOR should be 1.548." Ok, they won't notice the last one, but you get the idea. I'll have to find each one, and change them all manually.
That doesn't sound like Much of a problem, but I have multiple versions to set up, and lots of parts. So that's Lots to keep track of.

Is there any way to link One part of things?

I was also going to finally try out using multimaterial for multiple versions, but since I've got this issue, that really isn't going to help me any because I forsee changes. I'll set things up, and then we'll have to change things. But from my tests of how things work with scene sets or studios, whatever they are called now, and mutlimaterials, it would just be a nightmare.

So back to the old, have everything set up in one place, and just show/hide which one you need.

[andy.engelkemier]

So, I didn't apply the labels originally, and for whatever reason, the map doesn't seem to look Anything like where it actually is? So I kind of have to work around that a bit, but adjusting depth, I'm able to use one material for all of the objects.

I did it like this:

Open one material and open the material graph.
Drag in the next copy of the material with a different label. It'll be right on top of everything, so hit your handy dandy "Align nodes in work area" button.
Now drag Just the label node to your material and choose to add that as a label.
Delete the material node you dragged in, just to keep things cleaned up.

Now, you just have to assign that material to the object(s) that you just added the material from. Rotate around them to be sure having two labels applied didn't cause issues.

So now I have one object, with several labels, but only the few objects that actually Have labels show up (after adjust depth).

This is Not ideal, but it's working. In other software, I can just have different UV maps for different map channels.