Copying Materials

Boxshot maintains a separate list of materials for each object of the scene. Sometimes you might need to copy materials to another object and Boxshot lets you do this in multiple ways.

Copying Using Drag–and–Drop

The easiest way to copy material in Boxshot is to grab it with the mouse in the right panel and drag it onto the proper part of another shape.

Copying materials by dragging and dropping them in Boxshot

You can also copy materials within the same shape by dragging it inside the list of the materials panel:

Copying materials within the same shape in Boxshot

So basically you can drag built–in materials from the left panel onto the shapes, drag them onto the materials list on the right, drag materials from the right list onto the shapes or inside the list itself.

Saving Materials

You can also drag materials from the right panel onto your desktop or into other folders. Boxshot detects such dragging and creates a file with material properties where you drop it. The file contains all the parameters of the material except for the artwork.

In a similar way you can drag a material file from your desktop or other folder onto the shape in the Boxshot scene. Boxshot will apply such material the same way as it applies the materials you drag from the materials library panel or from the current materials panel on the right.

This feature lets you build your own library of materials in a special folder somewhere on your computer.

Note that Boxshot exports material settings, but not the artwork it uses. If you want to re–use complex materials later, you might want to put the artwork it uses next to the material file.

Batch–Copying Materials

There is another way to copy materials in Boxshot that sometimes works much faster: the copy materials tool. You can open it by selecting the source shape, right clicking it and selecting Tools → Copy Materials… item from the popup menu:

Using copy materials tool in Boxshot

The tool shows all the materials of the selected shape on the left and all the other shapes of the scene on the right. The idea is simple: you select the materials to copy and the shapes to receive the materials.

Here I configured the tool to copy Front and Spine materials to the paperback and magazine shapes:

Boxshot shows the preview of copied materials

As you may see Boxshot updates the preview in background to reflect the changes you request. Once done you can click OK to commit the changes.

Boxshot copies materials only if the target shapes have materials with same names. This works best for copying materials between the similar shapes like books or boxes.

More Tutorials

Rendering

Materials

Features

Shapes