In this video tutorial made with Blender 4.3, we’ll take a look at three simple operations related to Materials. The first two operations will allow us to hide or delete Materials, while the third will let us remove only the image references from the Image Texture nodes, while keeping those nodes inside the Materials.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this video tutorial made with Blender 4.3, we’ll take a look at three simple operations related to Materials. The first two operations will allow us to hide or delete Materials, while the third will let us remove only the image references from the Image Texture nodes, while keeping those nodes inside the Materials.
The first operation is the Override, which consists of temporarily applying a single Material to all the objects in the scene, while preserving their original Materials. This way, it will be possible to reapply the original Materials later on.
To perform this operation, we first need to define a new Material, which can be created either as a sub-material for an existing object or as the original Material for a new object that will be excluded from rendering, as I’m doing here. For convenience, I’ll name this new Material “Override”.
Now all we have to do is open the View Layers tab in the Properties editor, go to the Override section, and specify the newly created Material in the available field inside the tab.
Note that the objects still retain all their Materials, sub-materials, and any linked Image Textures. Overriding the Materials in this way is useful for getting a temporary preview, usually without Textures, reflections, or refraction effects. This can be helpful for evaluating the arrangement of objects in the scene and other aspects of the composition without being distracted by Materials, Textures, or other effects. A result like this is often called a Clay Render.
I’ll now remove the Material Override so we can move on to the second topic of this tutorial: removing all the Materials and sub-materials from all the objects in the scene. This operation can be useful if you want to redo or reassign the Materials to the objects, in which case it might be easier to remove them and recreate them from scratch. The method we’re about to use can also be applied to only a selection of objects in the scene, not necessarily to all of them.
To do this, we insert an object without any Material into the project and keep it selected. Then, we select all the objects in the scene by pressing A. This way, the new object will become the active object in the selection, and it won’t have any Materials assigned, as shown in its corresponding tab in the Properties editor.
In this tab, click the button with the downward arrow and choose the Copy Material to Selected option from the menu that appears. This tool allows you to assign the active object’s Material to all selected objects. Since the active object has no Material, the final effect of this operation will be to remove all Materials and sub-materials from the selected objects. At this point, we can also delete the new object.
However, keep in mind that Blender still keeps in memory both the various Materials and, more importantly, the images used as Textures. To truly remove these data from the project and reduce disk space usage, we need to use the Purge Unused Data operator found in the Clean Up section of the File menu.
I’m now reopening the original file, complete with Materials, sub-materials, and image Textures, to show you the third and final topic of this short video tutorial. This one is about removing the links to the image files used by the Image Texture nodes. Please note that this does not mean removing the Image Texture nodes themselves from the Materials, but only the links to the external image files.
This operation can easily be done manually by holding SHIFT and left-clicking on the image file name inside each Image Texture node. However, this is only practical if you have a few nodes: definitely not if you want to remove image references from all nodes in all the Materials of a project!
To perform this operation, simply open Blender’s script editor and type in the few lines of code I’m showing on screen, then run the script by clicking the Run Script button.
The script simply loops through all the Materials in the project and removes any links to external image files, if present. The last line of the script runs the Purge Unused Data operation for us, as we saw earlier in the tutorial, freeing the project file from any unused resources.
In the project I’m using for this example, some objects don’t appear magenta like the others, simply because their Materials didn’t make use of external Textures. In all other cases, the Image Texture nodes have been preserved, but the references to the external image files are no longer present.
Unlike most of my video tutorials, the PDF version of this tutorial is not currently available for download. However, in the description you’ll find a link to the page containing the PDF versions of many of my other tutorials. In any case, this is a great time to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. That’s it for this video tutorial! I hope it was helpful! See you soon!