9.5.2

MATERIAL MANAGER • 801
18. Material Manager
Good materials are every bit as important to photorealism as good modeling. Using the Material
manager, you can accurately recreate any type of material.
A thumbnail is displayed for each material, which, by default, shows how the material looks when
placed on a sphere in front of a striped background. You can change the size of the thumbnails using
the following commands on the Material manager’s Edit menu: Mini Icons, Small Icons, Medium Icons
and Large Icons. When you select an object in the Object manager, the thumbnails of materials it uses
appear depressed in the Material manager. If you select an individual Texture tag, only the thumbnail
of the material that is used by this tag appears depressed.
To apply a material to an object, drag the material’s thumbnail from the Material manager and drop it
onto the desired object in the Object manager or viewport. If you drop a material onto a Texture tag,
this material replaces the previous one. If instead you drop a material onto an object name or onto
an object in the viewport, a new Texture tag is created. An object may have multiple Texture tags, in
which case the textures are layered one on top of the other. The right-most Texture tag in the Object
manager is the top layer.
In addition to any materials that are active, you can also select materials. The names of selected
materials are displayed in red. The Material manager’s commands operate on the selected materials
only. To select a material, click its thumbnail. To add a material to the selection, Shift-click its
thumbnail. You can also use the cursor keys to change which material is selected.
To edit a material, double-click its thumbnail. This opens the Material Editor window, which has its
own preview picture. You can also edit the selected materials in the Attribute manager. You can access
many of the commands for materials via the context menu. To access this menu, right-click (Windows)
or Command-click (Mac OS) a thumbnail. To delete a material, click its thumbnail and press Backspace
or Delete . Texture tags that used this material will then show the following icon.
Even after deleting a material, the mapping data for the Texture tag is preserved.