Import and replace similarly names shaders

[Anonymous]

Greetings! In my workflow I receive meshes with often more than 50 materials applied to it, all simple Phong shaders, with specific naming conventions. I have created a new collection of shaders, each being Arnold shaders designed to replace the Phongs and with identical names. I was hoping exporting the shaders and importing into the original scene file would simply replace the original shaders with the identical names, but this instead seems to apply the name of the imported shader file which I've saved as a .MB file to the beginning of all the shaders instead of replacing them.

I seem to remember being able to do this once but seems like it doesn't work anymore. Am I missing something?

[trs_andre]

Hi|!

Not sure if this works for you but you could select an old material, click the option to select all the meshes using that material, and then apply the new material, deleting the old one in the end. After doing this to all materials, you could rename them with a MEL script.

It should be possible to do everything within the same MEL script, though. For example, if all the new materials have the same prefix, you could do something like:

- Run through all materials

- Check what meshes are using material "old_A" and reconnect them to material "new_A"

- Delete material "old_A"

- And so on

Hope it helps!

[jordan.giboney]

hi @Anonymous 

Thanks for posting! did you have a chance to try the suggestion from @trs_andre? Any success? If you found another workaround we would love to hear it as well 🙂 

Thanks again for being a part of our community!