Introducing Matalogue

Download / Documentation

I’ve actually been working on this on and off for a little while, and find it to be super helpful to manage large scenes…

All it is is a list of materials (and lights and compositing trees) in the toolbar of the Node Editor.

Clicking on an item will switch the Node Editor to that material/lamp/compositing tree.

Yep, that’s it :)

31 thoughts on “Introducing Matalogue

  1. Frikkin’ awesome addon! I just tested it in a large-ish scene, really makes my life a lot easier! thanks :D

  2. Hi Greg, cool work. Will this work for selections or meshes with multiple materials also? Cheers Markus

    • Yep! By default, it shows all the materials in your scene regardless of what you have selected. But check out the Options box – you can filter the list by showing only materials on selected objects (including objects with multiple materials).

  3. Hi Greg… excellent add-on! Will be recommending it to my students!

    Three features for your consideration:
    1. Materials that have emission shaders appear in lighting (perhaps an option?)
    2. Be able rename a material (Ctrl+LMB) as this is great for seeing all the crappy material names you have in one place :)
    3. Left-justify the text rather than centre… then can minimise the width…

    Just some thoughts…

    – andrew

    Blendertraining.com

    • Thanks for the suggestions Andrew!

      1. I was wondering about this. It could cause a pretty signifiant performance hit, but worth a try.
      2. This isn’t possible using the approach I’ve used, and it’s easy enough to just rename the material from the nearby header of the node editor.
      3. I don’t really understand how changing the text alignment could make more space?

  4. Hi Greg,

    2. Agree, once I had the material context open in the properties editor it made it easy as the materials updated as they were selected in Matalogue…

    3. Was thinking that as the items are centre aligned if you made the node toolbar column smaller it would collapse names in middle e.g. a material called apple_leaves would be come “…ple_lea…” which would be hard to recognise compared to left aligned which would be “apple_le…”.

    A number of my students have small laptops which have very little screen space, so was just thinking how to keep the node toolbar small but still recognisable.

    I just tested it and it collapses from the right like the second example. So now it is just a aesthetic consideration :)

    Thanks again!

    – andrew

    Blendertraining.com

  5. Hi again,

    Another quick consideration…

    4. If renderer is not CYCLES then turn Trees tab off. Just tried it with node based BI materials (which I didn’t expect to work) and it appears but just has the Compositor…

    Just a thought.

    – andrew

    Blendertraining.com

  6. Fred Flinstone

    Thanks Greg. You are always generous and fair with your time. Nice to see.

  7. Whoa what a great timesaver and smooth solution. Great work Greg I really appreciate it!

  8. Greg, this is just brilliant! Installed and will be using it. I’ve dabbled in Python, but I can’t say I have anywhere near your skill: reading the script is teaching me heaps. Thank you for your generosity in sharing your brilliance!

  9. Vasyl Pidgirskiy

    Very useful. Also it would be nice to have list of ids and ability to change them. Thanks!

  10. Dimitris Mylonas

    how do i download this?… sorry for the stupid question, i am new to blender.

  11. hello I have 1 question: does it works with blender internal material nodes?

  12. Omar Sierra Belmonte

    Hi, one question, I already install the script, but how do i search the script to activate it in the preferences –> addons menu. Whats it´s name?

  13. Thanks

  14. It works great. Thanks!

  15. Heather Jean Birkeland

    hi! i’ve installed it, but it’s not showing up? where can i find it? thanks =]]

  16. Marc Despres

    i just try to install the addom matalogue, and i receive this error

    FoundationBlender2.79scriptsaddonsmatalogue.py”, line 45
    expand_mat_options: bpy.props.BoolProperty(
    ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    can you do something about it
    ty

  17. muhrifkyamirullah

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