Material templates improvements

[cadjockey]

Hi

A few changes I'd like to see in material templates to make them more useful.

1. Allow merging of templates. We don't always use the same parts in every assembly but the materials assigned always go to the same new material. When working on a new product and appying the template now it only finds and changes half the parts (or however many were used in that template).  Being able to merge templates would allow us to gradually build up a super template that would automatically colour new products.  It may need a method of flagging duplicates but that could be as simple as highlighting the two rows in a colour or prompting the user to select which one to keep.

2. Add a button to anonymise the selected source part material/s and change them all to wildcards (part1:color:14:14:14 > *14:14:14) rather than having to edit each one manually

3. List the actual solidworks material name rather than just part/colour. This would make it easier to match (ie. source='Black Basketweave Vinyl' rather than 'part1:color:14:14:14'   (I have to use material templates as a single part could have many materials)

4. Allow an area in each template to write a small description about what it was for, a simple comment field etc, and possibly last updated date and by.

I also think there are still a few bugs with templates, they don't always behave how you expect. I'll create a new thread about this

Rich

[thomasteger]

Thanks for the feedback.

@3 - this will be possible with KeyShot 5.


We will look into the other things.

[cadjockey]

Thanks Thomas, looking forward to V5 already

Really just being able to merge templates would solve so many problems for me (even if I had to do it manually externally to keyshot for now)

Rich