Reply To: Materials and Slots
Hello John. Hmmm, nope, not really understanding what you are saying. But the basics of it is, when you have an object, you have the option to assign a material to it. That’s where that menu with the material slots come in. You could also leave the object without any material as well. But the key thing is, you can add just one slot because that’s the material your object is going to have, but Blender gives you the option to add many more slots to add a bunch of materials to that object, even though those materials are not going to be assigned to the object.
I guess you can picture that as a drawer. In your drawer you have a bunch of socks in there, even though you’re only going to use a pair at a time, you have all your socks in there anyways and you pick one to wear. In your object “material drawer”, you can have lots of materials there, eve though you’ll just assign one of them at a time to the object.
Now why would Blender give you the option to add more than one material slot if you’re going to assign just one material to the object anyways? Why have a bunch of slots in there? Well because you can add materials per faces on an object. In the Object Mode level of an object, you can add only one material in the drawer to that object, but if you enter Edit Mode, you can assign different materials to different faces. And that’s why you need the slots. You can have an object with 10 slots to have 10 materials live in it, so you can assign them to any face you like.
When an object is one solid mesh, and you don’t have it split apart into different objects, you need this ability to do that. For example the shirt in this character:
The shirt is just one mesh. The green, the white and the yellow are not separate objects, it’s all part of the same mesh and those faces just have different materials assign to them. So that mesh object probably has 3 material slots. One slot with a white material, the other with a yellow material and a green material. Or maybe that object has 20 slots with different material colors and the person only used those three materials, but he was testing how different colors look and he left those slots in there just so if he changes his mind later he can easily swap them.