Materials changing randomly in 3D window...

[Anonymous]

A rather odd and increasingly frustrating error is occurring when viewing the model in the 3D window. One minute I will be looking at and moving around the model with all materials showing properly, and the next minute a portion of wall and roof materials will change randomly to another material! This occurs while just orbiting around the model. The problem only began recently, and it seems to have happened at a point after I copied some parts from another, older project and pasted them into the current one. I make a lot of my own custom textures and give them unique names, but I suspect that the materials must have their own unique ID numbers and I have copied one (some) from an old project into the newer one. I have tried looking in the attributes manager, but it does not seem to list any of the unique ID names, just "common" names for materials.

Has anyone out there had to deal with this before? Is it simply a matter of trying to identify which materials are conflicting and then deleting one out of the project, or is it going to be a lot messier than that?

FYI, it is relatively easy for me to get the proper materials to show again in the 3D window. I just open the Settings Dialog Box and click "OK" and they all revert to what they should be... It just gets annoying... fast...

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Foster

[Erika Epstein]

Instead of copying and pasting to bring in materials use the attribute manager. This will allow you to append the new materials (and other attributes).

[Anonymous]

Hi Erika,

Thanks for the reply. I do usually use the attributes manager to bring in or append materials. The problem here is that I was told this current project needed to have the "exact" same garage doors as another older project. The older project is from before I worked at this company, and the garage doors were custom made out of walls and slabs. So, I copied this grouped-together compilation of things that made up the garage doors, and I then pasted it into the new project. And I did it without paying attention to the material(s) makeup of the garage doors in the old project. So, through a mistake I am learning my lesson, but I wonder if there is some way to view or change the unique identifiers that each material must have?? If so, I could at least see if there are conflicting identifiers and try to resolve it. I'm still not entirely positive that copying in the garage doors from the old project is the underlying problem. I'm starting to troubleshoot, and this seems the most likely source of the problem. If anyone has experienced or solved this before, I would love to hear about it.

Thank you,
Foster