Is there any easier way to just pick/change a material setting? Anything??

[patricks]

I'm talking just assigning or changing a material in a family, such as a wall or roof, or door, or whatever. Maybe just to change the hatch pattern. Who knows. I just want to pick a material from the list already defined. Is there not any faster way to do that?? It's PAINFULLY slow having to wait for the whole stinking material editor to open when all I want to do is pick something from the list.

[antman]

How slow is 'painfully'? My material editor takes about 3 seconds to load in a project, and about 1 second in a family. Not horrible, but I can see that if you have to pick materials this way for a bunch of objects it would be a pain. Have you closed the Material Editor window (assuming you are in 2013 where that is separate from the Material Browser window)? That makes it a little quicker. If not, next to the preview of the material in the editor portion, there should be a little drop-down arrow with some options. Maybe choose mental ray - Draft Quality?

[patricks]

We don't run particularly slow/old machines in our office, but even on my machine (fastest) it still seems like it takes quite awhile to open for the first time when trying to change a material on something, when both the Editor and the Browser windows open.

Also there seems to be some discrepancies as to when both open and when only the Browser opens. Sometimes I close the Editor, but then the next time I have to change a material, both windows open once again. It's the material's rendered view that takes so long. I don't see why they had to change it from where you clicked a different tab to see the render appearance. We don't do rendering all that much, so seeing a material's surface and cut hatch patterns when clicking on a material is much more important. But now to see those, we also have to see the render appearance, which slows the machine down.

[greg.mcdowell]

instead of forcing the dialog to open you could type in the name of the material... should be a little faster

[cliff collins]

http://whatrevitwants.blogspot.com/2...ls-editor.html

does this help?

[antman]

You can get rid of the preview completely! Thanks Cliff!

[cliff collins]

Credit goes to Aaron Maller--just passing along the info.