Automatically assign materials to objects

[yavaBBL49]

I got a very big issue. Every time I change wheels and suspensions to my vehicle on CAD program, all components get shifted and so, when I import the new 3D file into VRED, it doesn't perfectly overlap with the old one, which means I have to reassign the materials to hundreds , if not thousands of pieces manually, which takes forever.

I can't think people at Autodesk didn't think about a solution for this, so I'm pretty sure I'm missing a function for assigning materials automatically, like make VRED understand somehow that out of 1000 components which make the car, 980 stayed the same and just 20 of them changed, and so reapply all the same materials for those 980 components that weren't changed (but which are shifted in position on the new imported 3D file).

[seiferp · Accepted solution]

I think you have two options. Do you see these green nodes in your scenegraph? This means there is still the link to the original cat import that allows you a re-import in the context menu (RMB) of all files if you have overwritten your cad file and did not change the location. In the import dialog that appears you have the option to say keep current for the material assignment which tries to re-assign the material to the geometry. This is depending on how much your new model differs from the original import and works quite good if you have made only geometry changes. If your new import has new parts or differs  a lot from changes you have made inside VRED (geometry splitting) than this doesn´t work obviously. 

2nd option is to create a VRED asset material library were the materials have the same naming convention like the ones that come from your cad import. In the asset manager you have the option to assign materials by name which replaces the material in your scene with the ones from the asset manager based on that mapping table. You can set this option also directly in the import dialog when importing your model.

[yavaBBL49]

Thank you Pascal, that's what I was looking for.

Correct me please if I'm wrong: 1st option (Reload All Files) basically checks if there is a correspondence between the name of the nodes in your scenegraph and the name of the nodes in the files you are trying to import, and for every matching node, it applies the same materials. On the other hand, 2nd option does a similar job, but matches against the name of the default materials of the files you are importing rather than the name of the nodes.

If I understood it correctly, 1st option should be still good for most use cases; even in the event of replacing one component, it should still match the remaining 99% of components assigning the correct material to each one of those, and so I would be left just with one object to redo, which would be totally fine.