{ How to APPLY the SAME MATERIAL to MULTIPLE OBJECTS in Blender }

Introduction

In this article we see how to reuse the same material in different objects in Blender, that way when we modify the material that change is automatically applied to all the objects that are using the same instance of the material.

In the following video we see how to APPLY the SAME MATERIAL to MULTIPLE OBJECTS in Blender

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Creating and assigning material to an object in Blender

The first step will be to create the material, if you have already created a material continue down to “How to reuse a material in Blender“.

We start with the objects shown in figure 1, these have not yet been assigned any material so we will select one of them and go to the material tab with the icon shown in figure 2.

three objects in blender, two cubes and a sphere, the aim is to apply the same instance of the material to the objects — *Fig. 1: Set of objects to which a material is to be applied.*

tab for applying materials to an object and configuring them — *Fig. 2: Material properties of the selected object.*

Now let’s add a new Material Slot by clicking on the + button shown in figure 3. An object can have multiple materials assigned to different faces of the model, so you can add as many slots as you need.

The next step is to create the material by clicking on the “New” button, at this point we are creating the instance of the material, this step must be done only once if we want to reuse the same material.

Figure 4 shows the material I have created and assigned a name and color to it.

material slot of an object in blender — *Fig. 3: A new material slot is added to the object.*

material assigned to an object in blender — *Fig. 4: This is the material to be reused in the other objects.*

three objects in blender, two cubes and a sphere, one of them has an orange color assigned to it, we want to apply the same instance of that material to the other objects — *Fig. 5: The object shows the material that has been assigned to it.*

How to reuse a material in Blender

To reuse the material that was created in the previous step in another different object what we are going to do is select the other object and in the materials tab, instead of adding a new slot and creating a new material, we directly click on the materials icon (the sphere to the left of the new button in figure 6) and select from the list the material we want to reuse. In figure 7 we see the result, both objects have the same material assigned.

material instance selection in blender, this allows the reuse of the same material in different objects — *Fig. 6: The instance of the previously created material is assigned to the second object.*

two orange cubes and a sphere in blender, the same material has been reused for both objects. — *Fig. 7: Both objects show the same material.*

Modificar el color en un objeto en Blender cambia el color en otros objetos

This happens because both objects are assigned exactly the same material, precisely this is the concept of instance, a material has been defined in the scene and that same material has been assigned to different objects, the objects are simply using that material, so that when we modify it, for example if we change the color as shown in figure 8, all objects that are using that instance of the material will change their appearance, as shown in figure 9. If you want each object to show a different material you will have to create new materials as shown at the beginning of this article.