Copy Paste Values Between Materials

[jpwestmas]

I'm looking for the ability to copy a set of values in a material and paste them en masse to another material. Otherwise I have to either use UDIMs or duplicate materials and then reattach the textures to the duplicated material. I was looking for the ability several years ago in maya and still I don't see it.

[dgruwier]

This sounds more like a Maya interface thing than a VRay thing. You can try duplicate special to copy with inputs, or you can use the attribute editor presets (not sure if that works with connections though). But this is the kind of stuff people use scripting for, setting attributes and connecting nodes.

[jpwestmas]

True, it is a maya thing but maya is a flexible development environment and functionality like simple copy and paste can be added to the attributes menus after materials have been applied. I've seen this ability in far less flexible 3d apps/rendering systems. Yes, I can duplicate shader networks no problem but that means I have to reattach the textures between objects again and reapply the materials. It's an efficiency thing that I don't understand why its not in a pro-application.

[yolov]

I use the node presets inside Maya all the time, you should give those a try. Basically, on any node, you can hit Presets > Save and then on another node of the same type do Presets > Blend 100% (to completely replace everything). See this for reference: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo...6B3C3-htm.html

I'm not sure how it handles incoming connections, my bet is that it doesn't (and I'm not in front of Maya at the moment to test), but values are coming across perfectly.

[yolov]

Also one thing I've noticed Autodesk have improved in 2018 is that when you copy-paste a shading graph in the hypershade, it will copy the node graph UP TO the node that you've selected - which I find pretty handy. Before it was copying the entire graph regardless of whether you've selected anything in it. Say you have a place2d > file > remapHSV > shader. Selecting the remap and doing copy-paste will make a copy of only the place2d > file > remap. Just wanted to mention this as well.

[jpwestmas]

Thanks for pointing that out to me. I'll definitely look into it because I often find I need the same shading applied between objects at different times during the scene build, but need different texture maps also. I actually am used to node editing but maya's is really visually annoying to me but perhaps I'm exaggerating and just avoiding it for no reason.

[yolov]

I understand this perfectly. I myself come from 3ds max originally and it took me a lot of time back in the day to struggle to recreate my 3ds max workflows in Maya. What happened to me over the years is that I just gave in little by little and that freed me to explore and adopt the Maya-specific features and workflows.

All in all just to say - give it a try, as this has been an invaluable part of my workflow for years and I find the options I mentioned above very, very useful.

[jasonhuang1115]

Also one thing I've noticed Autodesk have improved in 2018 is that when you copy-paste a shading graph in the hypershade, it will copy the node graph UP TO the node that you've selected - which I find pretty handy. Before it was copying the entire graph regardless of whether you've selected anything in it. Say you have a place2d > file > remapHSV > shader. Selecting the remap and doing copy-paste will make a copy of only the place2d > file > remap. Just wanted to mention this as well.

Sweet, Alex. I know if I can learn a thing or two each day just by reading your replies.