Replace Materials - but keep the name

[Al Hart]

As part of our Material Styles project, we needed a quick way to place library materials into a model without changing the name of the material.

This is valuable if you prefer to have functional material names, like Lumber 4x4, which you use for reporting and want to change the color without changing the material or if you Material Styles - which replaces all materials in a model by name, but needs to preserve the original names.

Map-Replace Materials is a function on the Place Material Wizard which lets you select a material from a library - or another material in your model and 'Map' it to a material in your model - replacing the color, texture and other attributes without changing the name of the current material.

First select a material using the left and center pane, then select one or materials in the model in the right hand pane.

Click Assign to assign the material in the center pane to the materials in the right hand pane.

Repeat this as often as desired to map all the material you want.

Notice that we are assigning the Red color to the lower cabinet base and doors which are currently white.

When you click Apply all the material assignments will be applied to the model

This makes it easy to make multiple color and texture assignments, and apply them by material name to your model - keeping the existing material names.

Beta Test

This is currently only available for testing in IRender nXt. If there is interest we will find a way to release it as part of RpTools rather than IRender nXt.

Download the latest version of IRender nXt to see it in action.

If you need a new 30 day trial of IRender nXt to try it out, send us an email at support@renderplus.com

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What do you think - will this be useful for SketchUp models?