Updating master material does not update individual parts

[VTch]

Is there no way to have a master material, say, Al6061 applied to multiple parts?

If I update the master material all the parts that were already made with this material do not get updated.

So now to enforce the master material I need to manually select and re-assign the same material......

Surely there's a way of making the Library a reference for said part(s)?

[KenFarley · Accepted solution]

As far as I know since long ago, this is how things like materials, appearances, etc. work. It can make for some tedious open->change->save->close sessions.

Probably based upon the premise that material properties are generally a constant, therefore can be assigned as a static set of values in a model.

If you need to update a bunch of parts with changed material properties, you could define a mapkey to do the update so it's a single button push once you've opened a part file. I have this kind of thing to update part/assembly parameters whenever I need to work with very old models at our company.

If there are very many files to be updated, you could either give Pro/Batch a try, or build a trail file to process lots of files.

[VTch]

I see, was hoping I was missing something. Thanks for clarifying 🙂