Tip: Storing Shaders in Blender
Pierrick writes:
Here is a short tip video showing you how to store your shader group in your Blender startup file.
It also cover how to create a simple mixing values group in Blender as since 2.71 version, the RGB average value doesn’t correspond to the HSV value in colour and it is a bit confusing when you want to set accurate values to your shaders.
The description and method seems quite complicated. I have a file called MaterialsLibrary.blend that contains a bunch of cubes each with a different material. In Blender, I opened a new file, linked all the materials from MaterialsLibrary.blend and then saved the blank file as my default startup file. Since all the materials in MaterialsLibrary.blend are saved as fake user, whenever I start a new blend file all my materials are there waiting to (re)use.
If I want to improve a material, all I need to do is edit the material once in MaterialsLibrary.blend. Then, every project that uses the material will automatically use the improved material when it’s next opened.
Yes, it seems like a more simple way to go.
However, I’m sure it must be tedious to have all those materials by default in every scene… It would be so great to have a general library apart from the scene materials collection…
I’m sure there have been requests for this, anyone know if there are plans to integrate a custom material library into blender sooner or later?
You’re right, currently here I was mostly looking at how to store nodes group more than material.
I believe having a material library is better if you wanna load materials.
Here it was mostly to show how to store nodes group to re-used them when creating materials.
BTW, if you have a material library, you could asign all the materials to a single mesh, and link it in your empty scene then delete it, it will be faster than loading each material.
Or you can group all your cubes, link the group, delete them the same way.
Link library are cool, but I found it kinda dangerous. I’m working on game environement lately and I do reuse the same shaders oftenly but I also tweak them for each scenes, especialy for tile texture scale.
Even a good shader without textures also depend on the scale of the object. Absorption, subsurf, may not work the same depending on the object scale, that’s why it can be tricky….
Anyway, that’s a good thing you’ve pointed this out.
Thanks