Default material type when dragging and dropping image texture?

Rendering
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In Rhino 8, when you drag and drop a texture on an object the material type generated is Physically based. 95% of the time the material type I am using in my workflow is Picture type and it’s quite annoying that when you change the material type to picture from the dropdown selection Rhino asks for the texture path again. Is there a way to change the default material type when assigning textures this way?

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Hell chief, it could be a workaround, but you can create your Picture material and save the file like a new template.
Best regards
Bartle

Edit: obviously it preserves your Picture’s directory

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Thank you for the reply Bartle! My picture material is always different and this work around would not save me the hassle of repathing the texture.

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When you drag and drop an image texture on Rhino you should get this dialog with Picture selected by default:

image

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Hi @chief ,

I’ve filed this as https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-82610 for future reference. Thanks for the report.

In the meantime, Nathan’s suggestion of dragging and dropping to some empty space in the viewport to create a Picture material and then assigning that material to an object via the Materials panel would be my suggestion too.

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Thanks for the reply Nathan. I meant when you drag directly on an object(surface/polysurface) not in the empty space.

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Thanks Brian! It does seem like a fast workaround. I could just drop the picture somewhere and use the matchproperties command to make my object picture type material(or asssign from the mat panel, I just use match seems faster); it’s an extra step but should be fast enough. Thank you for filing the issue! seems like a no brainer that the new material should inherit the file path from the pbr material. Also, unrelated to this thread, I use the select command a lot and a subcommand I would find really helpful would be “SelSelfIlluminated” or something like that; The picture material type comes in with self illumination by default and I always turn it of. If there’s a different way to select items with this property I would like to know. Again, thank you for your answer!

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Hi @chief ,

There is a SelPicture command but that will only select surfaces created with the Picture command and it sounds like you may want to select/filter the materials that are picture type in the material editor. For that you’d have to assign a tag to the material via the right click menu for it, e.g. “Pic”

image
image584×1176 54 KB

Then you can use the search icon at the top of the Materials panel to filter what is shown by assigned tag. In this way you could select multiple materials and edit this setting in unison but you’d have to assign the tags.
image

However, if you used the default Physically Based material type when dragging and dropping the image texture it wouldn’t have the self illumination option enabled.

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Thanks a ton Brian! Can’t believe I didn’t know about the SelPicture command. For my purpose is just what I needed. Also the tag option could come in handy in many scenarios.

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