Drag and Drop Sub-Object Material Assignment
 
 
 

You can apply a material to a selection of renderable sub-objects, such as faces in a mesh. In the Material Editor, you can use Assign Material to Selection. You can also drag the material from the Material Editor or the Material/Map Browser to the selected faces. This can create a new Multi/Sub-Object material on the fly.

You can disable drag-and-drop of materials to sub-objects. To do so, go to the General tab of the Preferences dialog, and in the Sub-Materials group, turn off Assign Automatically. This check box is on by default.

How the Multi/Sub-Object Material Is Created

The Multi/Sub-Object material is created in one of three ways, depending on what material is already applied to the selected sub-objects:

Procedures

To drag materials onto sub-object selections:

  1. In the Modify panel modifier stack, choose Face as the sub-object level.
  2. Select faces of an editable mesh object.
  3. Drag a material’s output socket from the Slate Material Editor active View to the selected faces, or from a sample slot in the traditional interface.
  4. In the modifier stack, click to turn off Sub-Object and return to the object level.
  5. On the Material Editor, click (Pick Material From Object), then use the eyedropper cursor to get the material from the object.

    The new Multi/Sub-Object material appears in the active View.