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Once a group of surfaces have the same material assigned to them you can do what you are asking. But at first I do think you need to link them all. (i have not read the manual since day one, and so maybe there is a way, but the manual was empty so I just fiddled around myself)

So if you manually link all 7 or so surfaces to Material1 and later decide you want to use Material2, you can just drag material2 on top of material one and all surfaces will be udpated.

But that doesn't help you initially, but it may not be that big of a deal later on once things are set up the way you want.

linvanchene wrote:My first idea was to select all those surfaces with shift but now I am stuck what to do next.
My idea was to somehow drag the material over to the selected surfaces.

nearly there - just the other way round: you would drag the bunch of n selected daz surfaces from the right tree to 1 octane material in the left tree.

the reason why it works only in this direction: dragging over entries in the other tree also needs to select them, so whenever dragging an entry from one to the other tree, the other tree will update its selection to the potential drop entry; since you can't drag more than one octane material at a time (as they can be only linked 1 octane material to 1-n daz surfaces, or only 1 octane material can by replaced by 1 other), you usually don't notice this, since you normally don't even try to drag a bunch of selected octane materials. hope that was clear enough...

ps: i once had also "link" options in the context menu, but in the end that got pretty abstract since you can of course have a bunch of octane materials selected, i.e. to perform other tasks, that are allowed to work with more than one octane mat (like replacing textures, changing type, unlinking, deleting, ...), but if you have now also a bunch of daz materials selected, the "link" option would need to reduce the target octane selection to 1 anyway (no matter from which side it would be called), or you would need to do this by hand - this ended in selection changes and/or context menu options that were just not easy to understand.

dragging on the other hand - which is always possible in both directions (and within the octane tree for replacements) - allowed to much more clearly show what goes where. since this also selects to current hovered entry - which would be the drop target (and shows you the actual material settings in the right pane to have another way to control if this is wanted).

means you can always link 1 octane material to 1 daz surface when going from left to right, no matter how much previous selections were active (so you don't need to deselect entries), and 1-n daz surfaces to 1 octane material by going from right to left - also without the need to deselect entries on the target side.

ok. this was pretty much stuff about "select", "1", "n" - so the bottom line:

- drag one entry from the left tree (octane) to one entry in the right tree (daz) to link them together,
- drag one or more entries from the right tree (daz) to one entry in the left tree (octane) to link them also,
- drag one entry to another one entry in the left tree (octane) to replace the target octane material by another (from wherever taken).

plus dragging single mats from the live db thumbs view of course, or dropping octane mats directly into the viewport...

t_3 wrote:

linvanchene wrote:My first idea was to select all those surfaces with shift but now I am stuck what to do next.
My idea was to somehow drag the material over to the selected surfaces.

nearly there - just the other way round: you would drag the bunch of n selected daz surfaces from the right tree to 1 octane material in the left tree.

the reason why it works only in this direction: dragging over entries in the other tree also needs to select them, so whenever dragging an entry from one to the other tree, the other tree will update its selection to the potential drop entry; since you can't drag more than one octane material at a time (as they can be only linked 1 octane material to 1-n daz surfaces, or only 1 octane material can by replaced by 1 other), you usually don't notice this, since you normally don't even try to work with a bunch of selected octane materials. hope that was clear enough...

AAAAH! Thanks