Organising Materials Library

[sdesaulles]

OK, the ability to add materials and group them is great, but what happens when you want to try to reorganise them?

I seem to have got something over 450 materials, including things like two groups called 'wood' which are not identical.  What I want to do is remove duplicates and consolidate my library.

What I want to do is

1. rename some material 'groups' - is there a way to rename?
2. delete others, but without destroying the materials, I want them to drop back into the 'all' category.
3. create some new groups and reassign the materials from the 'all' to these.

so, if I select 'remove group' it asks me to 'please remove all materials in the group before deleting it'. Then, if, within the group I select 'remove material', it does not, as you might imagine, remove it from the group but keep it in 'all', it deletes it completely. Gone forever!

I tried looking in the Finder (OSX) to see if I could sort the groups there somehow, but there are a mix of .mtl, .mat and .bip files, I'm not sure which ones do what or why there are three types - anyone know?
They are all the names of material 'groups' as far as I can tell, so there is no way to remove individual materials.

Is it possible to have some 'best practice' type notes on materials / libraries please.  It seems creating a proliferation of new stuff is really easy, managing what you already have is much more difficult.  When I add a material to a group, is it adding a copy or just a reference in a 'shortcut / alias' container?

It would be great to have an Adobe Bridge type 'cut' and 'paste' type interface that allowed assets to be easily managed and duplicates identified.

I thought perhaps another way to 'trick' the software might be to edit the material, hit the + sign to add to the 'all' collection, but the only group you cant add it to is the 'all' group, and the one it resides in already.

Another thought was that applying a material to an object, deleting the material from the group, then editing the material and adding to the 'all' group might work, no, 'paste' is greyed out and it even gives my 'English Walnut' the name 'beer 2' for some reason, so applying it to an object seems to loose its name.  Ho hum.

So do I have to copy each material individually from the 'all' group(I can't seem to copy more than one material at a time), then paste into the new material 'group' - it then renames as 'Name#1' etc, then delete the original material, then rename the #1 name back to the original.  V painful and slow, but I suppose this works - is it really the only way?

Any help gratefully received.  I imagine I am not the only one with a mess of an assets library in KS2.

Stephen

[chippwalters]

It would sure be great if each group was in fact a logical folder on the drive. That way it would be super easy to keep all groups organized, including backdrops, renderings, environments, etc..

[sdesaulles]

Agree, folders that Keyshot could 'see' would be very good for materials.

Sadly don't seem to be getting any clever ideas for how to work with the existing system, perhaps best to raise directly with support, but imagine WYSIWYG is the current answer.  Perhaps will improve going forward.

[guest84672]

WYSIWYG - We understand the limitations and are in the process of reworking it.