Applying material to instances; is it possible?

[myself44]

Hello
Im working on a scene with a couple hundred of chairs, all instanced.
So when I click on one, all the rest gets 'seleceted' along.

But when I right-click on the material and choose "assign material to selected", it only applies to the one I clicked, not the othe hundreds..
so is there a way to assign one time the material on one object and get all the instanced ones applied too ?

It would take me so long to manually select them all

thx

[InProgress]

Go into the hypershade window, select your instance, right click on the desired material and select assign to selected. Voila!

[myself44]

Yea that's what I did first.
The problem is that the material is only applied to the object i selected, and not the other hundreds of instances.
So basically, to apply a same material on all instanced object, I still have to select them one by one and apply.
Im trying to figure a way of applying the material without clicking on every instance.

any ideas ?

[InProgress]

Can't you box select all the chairs? If you can try the method from above, with all the chairs selected.

[hovercrafter]

If all your chairs are named numerically, you could do it with a simple Mel script

for ($r=2;$r<10;$r++){
string $name="pCube" + $r;
string $sel =`select -r $name`;
sets -e -forceElement blinn1SG;
}

Change the $r=2 to the first number in your instanced copies and the $r<10 to the last number (plus 1). Then change the pCube to whatever the names are minus the numbers. Finally change the blinn1SG to the name of the shader you are applying

So if you have chair1 (the original) chari2 chair3 chair4 chair5....chair200 and the sg is named chairSG the script would look like this:

for ($r=2;$r<201;$r++){
string $name="chair" + $r;
string $sel =`select -r $name`;
sets -e -forceElement chairSG;
}

[supertom44]

Or go into the outliner and select all the chairs with a simple shift click or two, and then apply the material to them all.

[myself44]

Originally Posted by hovercrafter

If all your chairs are named numerically, you could do it with a simple Mel script

for (=2;<10;++){
string ="pCube" + ;
string =`select -r `;
sets -e -forceElement blinn1SG;
}

Change the =2 to the first number in your instanced copies and the <10 to the last number (plus 1). Then change the pCube to whatever the names are minus the numbers. Finally change the blinn1SG to the name of the shader you are applying

So if you have chair1 (the original) chari2 chair3 chair4 chair5....chair200 and the sg is named chairSG the script would look like this:

for (=2;<201;++){
string ="chair" + ;
string =`select -r `;
sets -e -forceElement chairSG;
}

omg it works!!
I never really read about or checked the MEL. Just the word script freaks me out :P

anyway thx very much, that saved me a lot of time!

[hovercrafter]

Those are about the handiest few lines of MEL there is. I keep a MEL tab with basically that same code in my script editor. I haven't learned a lot of the commands in MEL yet, but it's easy to find them by doing the operation once and copying the command from the script editor into your loop.