True material copy in the material manager

[John_Do]

Hi,

I often duplicate materials in the Material Manager with the Ctrl-Drag command and in this context I DON'T want to keep the links with the original material, just a plain copy.

Having to open node editor, dragndropping the material, selecting the entire node tree and drag-copy to get a real copy is cumbersome and add so much friction to the workflow.

Would it be possible to get the ability to duplicate the materials without the links to the original material's nodes ? Ideally as a new setting in the preferences.

[tuami]

+1

[bnji]

Hello @John_Do,


Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Could you please elaborate a little bit more about this? I'm not sure I quite understood the issue.
I tried reproducing this duplicating (Drag'nDrop) a material directly in the C4D material editor and also in the Corona Node Material Editor, but I couldn't reproduce the issue.
If you have a scene project where this is happening, it can also be handy to share it with us.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

[d4l1]

Hi!
Hope it is fine if I share our problem with that behavior too. :)

Drag + Drop doesn't always make that link to the original material, but where it happens every time is when I load the material from the Asset Browser more than one time. The attached screenshot shows both materials (ofc, same name and all that, but that shouldn't matter). This really turns to a nightmare if you forget that you already have that material loaded already. To prevent errors, we also use the Corona Node Editor Drag and Drop method.

I tried to reproduce it with a simple, new Physical material and a Color node linked into it. But it seems to work there. Don't know if this is some problem that happens with older materials only?

[John_Do]

Hello @John_Do,


Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Could you please elaborate a little bit more about this? I'm not sure I quite understood the issue.
I tried reproducing this duplicating (Drag'nDrop) a material directly in the C4D material editor and also in the Corona Node Material Editor, but I couldn't reproduce the issue.
If you have a scene project where this is happening, it can also be handy to share it with us.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Thanks Benjamin, I'm in holidays so I don't have access to my projects, but that's happening in every production scene so far, though in a very random way. But the issue is perfectly demonstrated by @d4l1 above.

Like some other issues in Corona, scene complexity and/or working on a saved scene ( as opposed to working on a new document ) seem to play a role. I tried to reproduce the issue on a new document with some imported materials from the Corona Material Library and some custom ones without much success.

I keep you posted if I manage to get a scene where it's happening.

EDIT : I think the Shared shader has something to do with this, I've connected a shader to several material inputs, duplicated the material with a drag-n-drop in the material manager, and the problem happens.



In this case only the Shared shader is linked to both materials, but often standard shaders are also linked to both materials, like in the example from @d4l1.