I go to the materials tab. I can see a list of materials that I can assign. I can create a new material.
I can delete the material (NOT what I want). I can reset (something??) to defaults (what does that DO??).
I can right click on the material and get a context menu that has no obvious command for unassigning the material. I can get that same menu by clicking on the button with the three lines.
But how do I remove a material from selected objects? I can’t even assign the no-material
When I assign a material to the layer I don’t get asked if I want to override the individual object materials which seems fair enough but it was my last hope for removing the material assignment.
Anyway, guys, I throw myself on your collective mercies, how do I do this? Help!
There is no such thing as “no material assignment”.
Create a new layer.
Look at it’s default material assignment.
I think it’s a white plaster material.
Assign that to the layer you want to have no assignment.
I shouldn’t have mentioned layers, it just confuses matters.
I want to remove a material assignment to some surfaces.
Eons ago I had some surfaces with a material assigned to them. I put them in a layer and gave that layer a material.
Today I changed the layer material and noticed that the change didn’t affect the surfaces. It was at that point that I realized that the surfaces had their own material assignment that overrode the layer assignment.
I can right click the layer and chose Remove Material. This does not remove the material assigned to the individual objects, it just removes the assignment to the layer. To be clear, I am not surprised by this, I pretty much expect this behavior.
But I would prefer to remove the individual assignments and manage materials by layer. I can see the point in being able to override the layer assignment on a per object basis and I’m sure that I would choose to do this from time to time but I don’t like the Chinese Finger Puzzle nature of individual material assignment (once you have it then you are stuck with it).
My mention of the no-material was just a joke. Even a convoluted way of removing a material assignment is still better than having no way to remove a material assignment. And I’m not asking McNeel to add the no-material to Rhino. Well I’m tempted but that would just bend people’s brains.
I just need a Remove Material for selected objects.
Talking of which… I just found it. I selected the surfaces and went to the properties tab and set them to use the layer material.
That was fairly convoluted. I expected to find the option in the materials tab. I was looking in the wrong place.
As JB said above you cannot have a “no-material”, otherwise, in any rendered views the objects would not show up, as rendered views are material-based. In order to see something in those views, you do need a material assigned either to the layer or the object. This is much the same as you cannot have a layer or object with “no display color”, they have to have some color or they would be invisible.
For material, the classic approach (since Rhino V1.0) is to assign a neutral default material if an object or layer does not have any other material assigned. Thus “remove material” simply removes any custom material assignment and substitutes the required default material. If it was per-object before, it becomes by-layer. If the layer has the default material, the appearance will be default.
Hi guys, I have a different spin on the same question. I have a model of a tree with materials assigned it. The tree and a folder containing the assigned materials are both filed in the same ‘parent’ folder on my drive. Two ways I’ve discovered how to remove the materials from the tree (as the materials are not listed in the materials tab) are (1) move the folder containing the materials from the the ‘parent’ folder and (2) copy the model into a new model. Is there a way to just ‘unlink’ the materials from within Rhino? Thanks.
