Locate materials

arail1

Is there any way to see where a material is in the model by selecting it in the Materials panel? I brought a model in from the Warehouse and suddenly I've got dozens of materials and I'd like a simple way to highlight them like I can do in modo so I can see where they all are.

Possible?

Thanks

massimo

Select a material in the "in model" materials panel-->right click-->select. However it doesn't work with groups or components, you have to "open" them first.

Gaieus

ThomThom's selection toys can select items (groups/components) even when they are nested. I do no know but maybe it could be modified to also select faces with the same material inside groups/components?

I also often find that seemingly simple models in the warehouse have dozens of materials and many of them are very similar (so there is no apparent reason). Most of the times it is even easier to completely delete all materials (especially pure colours) and re-texture the whole thing.

arail1

Thanks for both replies. Right clicking and choosing Select after 'opening' a group does exactly what I want.

Yes, models come in from the Warehouse with a weird assortment of materials and when I select one in the Materials panel and hit Delete, I always get a splash screen saying that material is in use - even when it clearly is not.

Thanks again.

Gaieus

Materials can be assigned to groups/components and edges, too, so they are not always that easy to get rid of.

ThomThom has a nifty plugin to work with such messy models:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=17587
and he also has one that you can use to quickly replace one material with the other:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=26013

Also it is often an issue that these WH models are compilations of some other WH models (thus the very similar or sometimes same materials with different names). TIG has a plugin that aims to consolidate them:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=33516