Material Picker

shortcut RIGHTMOUSE NOTE: disabled by default! see video for details

The Material Picker does three things:

  1. It picks a material for you to work on in the Shader Editor directly from the 3D view, without you having to select an object and finding the correct material from the object's material stack.
  2. It assigns a material to any object or face selection, by picking it from another object in the 3D view.
  3. It assigns a material from the asset browser to multiple objects through individual sequential picks, or all at once.

Right Mouse Keymap

The default RIGHTMOUSE keymap likely conflicts for many users with Blender's native mapping for the context menu.
This is why I chose to leave it deactivated by default, but I recommend you enable it to try it. There is more info below on how you can make it work for you.

You can enable it in two ways:

ActivateMaterialPickerRMBKeymap1 1. in the General tab of the MACHIN3tools addon preferences

Note

If you leave it disabled, you can chose to add the Material Picker to the top of the context menu instead! MaterialPickerTopLevelContextMenu

ActivateMaterialPickerRMBKeymap2 2. in the Keymaps tab of the MACHIN3tools addon preferences

Keep in mind

The tool is built in a way to work with RIGHTMOUSE as the keymap to invokeRMB press and finishRMB release the tool.
So mapping it to somthing other than RIGHTMOUSE is not recommended at this point.
You are free to add a modifier key however, if you want to keep RIGHTMOUSE exclusively for your context menu.

Material Picker Context

Note, that even when enabled, RIGHTMOUSE will only ever invoke the Material Picker, if you are in a shading mode, that displays materials, such as MATERIAL or RENDERED shading.
It can also invoke in SOLID shading, but only if your have MATERIAL chosen as the color_type.

Furthermore, if you don't have a Shader Editor or Asset Browser in the current workspace, while also not having any object or face selection, then Material Picker will also not invoke.

In these cases RIGHTMOUSE will be passed through to Blender and do what it would otherwise do, like open the context menu, if that is in your keymap.

Button

MaterialPickerButton

The button to call the tool is availabe on all 3D views that show materials:

  1. Material shading
  2. Rendeted shading
  3. Solid shading, if Material is chosen as the color type

Preferences

MaterialPickerPreferences

Using Material Picker