Material Tag

Material Tag

This command creates a new material. Initially, no material is assigned. To assign a material, drag the material’s preview from the Material Manager and drop it into the tag’s Material box on the tag page of the Attribute Manager (The normal workflow, however, is as follows: Drag a material from the Material Manager onto an object. A properly linked Material tag will automatically be created).

You can also select multiple Material tags and assign a material to all of them at the same time.

You can assign as many Material tags as you like to an object. This allows you to apply multiple texture layers to the same object. The material priority increases to the right in the Object Manager. In other words, the right-most material is the top layer, the left-most material is the bottom layer and the other textures are between these. The top layer will cover the object completely unless it is limited in size or has an alpha channel enabled.

To apply a material to an object, do one of the following:

• Drag the material from the Material Manager and drop it on to the object’s name in the Object Manager. The material settings will appear in the Attribute Manager. The mouse pointer will change during this process to indicate the add state:

• Select the object in the Object Manager and select the material in the Material Manager. In the Material Manager, choose Material / Apply. The texture settings will appear in the Attribute Manager.
• Drag & drop a new material on to an existing Material tag. The new material will replace the old one, but will inherit the existing Material tag settings.
• Drag & drop the material directly onto the object in the viewport. If you hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key at the same time, a menu will appear if there is more than one object in the area where you drop the material. Use the menu to choose which object the material should be applied to.
• Drag the object from the Object Manager and drop it into the Assignment box on the material’s Assignment tab (Attribute Manager). This method gives you a quick way to assign the same material to multiple objects.

When you assign a material to an object, a Material tag is created and the tag’s settings appear in the Attribute Manager. These texture settings define how the texture is mapped (i.e. placed) onto the object’s surface. For example, you may want the texture to be tiled (i.e. repeated) or you may want to place the texture on a specific part of the object. You can also have the texture mapped to one side only (decal mapping).