Save and load the whole material-set on a figure or object

[Jochen Sutter]

Hello

I think it’s not possible to save and load a whole material-set of a figure or object in blender or in the differmorphic addon. I know I can copy the whole mat-set from one object to another, but I can’t save and load or append it?

[Aszrael]

If you have a material set, so simply load and apply it.

Don’t get your point - maybe you should specify your question. You cannot load DAZ materials in blender or other software and vice versa - you have to convert it. That’s one part this addon does. The results highly depend on your source daz-material and the render engine you choose - like for all other software.

[Jochen Sutter]

I want to save all materials of a Figures wich have 10 or more different materials like Eyes, teeth, face skin, legs skin etc.. So my question is if it's possible so save and load all the materials of an object in one step to laod them on an other figure also in one step.

I know I can save all this materials separately via Material Libary VX. But this is not so comfortable to load it on another figure. I must to this with each material separately. With the addon it’s possible to copy all materials of one figure to another figure in one step. That’s the way how I do it at the moment. But I would prevere to save all materials of an object to a file or as an asset to load it all together to another object in one step.

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[Aszrael]

“With the addon it’s possible to copy all materials of one figure to another figure in one step.”

You gave yourself the answer: Use this addon! You have your Character A. Append the finished Character B. Transfer, with this addon-script all Materials B->A at once, delete Character B. done.

You might even consider making an asset out of you finished Character. it could not be more easy to simply drag your finished character into the scene.

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Blender is a 3D-modelling Program for people creating new characters/object to their needs. Each creator uses his/her way of assigning materials to it. There is no standard.

DAZ3d only uses Daz characters. All - within one generation - share the same data structure. So materials are interchangeable - but only within the DAZ family. Outside of DAZ3d - how should any program know where to put what?

So: either you tell blender via one-by-one assignment to which slot a material belongs, or: write a script, an Addon. Blender has nothing to do with DAZ3d, you know. And as most use it to create new stuff - not DAZ specific characters - I would wonder if you find an Addon doing it - except the one you are using right now…

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Btw: how you do:

“With the addon it’s possible to copy all materials of one figure to another figure in one step.”
This might be useful for anyone.

[Alessandro Padovani]

In general blender was never good at handling materials so Thomas wrote a number of nice and powerful utilities for the daz materials. There’s also a new “import daz materials“ tool in advanced setup > materials that’s not documented yet. See #857.

As for saving all the figure materials to be reused later, you may do it with a material preset in daz studio. Then import it in blender.

https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/materials-section-version-16.html

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[Jochen Sutter]

Thank you for your answers

Because I use my own configured skins, the material editor doesn’t work for me. I think the best way for me is to use the addons “copy all materials” of one figure to another figure. I will make a file with all charakters with their skin-type I have. So I can append the wanted charakter-skin to my current file → copy the material to my current figure and delete the appended charakter again.

It's not as comfortable as I would like, but it seems to be the best way at the moment. I also have plants and cloth etc wich have complex meterial settings. The handling of materials seems not so optimal in Blender like I'm used to in DAZ or Poser.

[Jochen Sutter]

A way could be to mark the body-mesh as an asset. So I can drag this mesh from the asset browser to my current scene and copy the material to my figure I want.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Yes but it isn’t different than appending the daz figure the old way, it’s just more “cool looking“. The real limit is that there isn’t a “material set“ concept in blender. Even with the asset browser you have to copy materials one by one.

If it may be of any help, you don’t need a daz figure to store the material set. You can use a primitive with the same material names. So you can have a sphere for “g8f-palette“, another for “g3f-palette“ and so on. The sphere template you only need to make once, then copy and paste from the figure with the “copy materials“ tool. See #947.

As a side note personally I don’t like too much the asset browser at least in this first implementation. The reason is that it just keeps the whole scene files with some items marked as assets. This can be a huge waste of memory for HD scenes. Especially if you use HD objects to store material assets for example. A better way would be to only keep the assets and delete everything else in the scene but this is not done.