Material templates: need to be able to merge them

[Eric A.]

Hi everybody,

Working in the service end of light manufacturing, I do animations of Solidworks assemblies with thousands of parts apiece.
I have a lot of material templates that have been derived--over years--from applying materials to these Solidworks parts. These are applying the material to the Solidworks part based on the part's part number... so, they're "Part - Automatic" templates.

What I want to do is combine these material templates into a single, big "corporation-wide" material template that can be built on by applying it, applying materials to parts I don't have yet, and then adding the new materials I've applied to the material template.

How can I do that? I've poked around inside the .kmtp with editing and rearchiving, and I can't seem to get the edited .kmtp file to import properly.

Thanks, any help would save me and my colleagues HUGE amounts of work,
Eric A.

[INNEO_MWo]

Hello Eric.
This can be easily done with a text editor.
I would create a new material template (manual / part). Then open the new empty rule file in notepad and paste the rules from the other templates in. At least copy every material file and the textures to the new template folder and restart KeyShot.

Hope that helps.


CheerEO
Marco


P.S. written with a mobile device

[Eric A.]

Holy smokes. That works!

Looks like I never had the idea to edit the file and the restart Keyshot; I was concerned with making a .kmtp file for which I could use the "Import..." function.
This will make this area of our workflow tremendously more efficient--THANK YOU!! ! ! !

Eric A.