Atomic Blender Material Compactor

(C) 2020 James Dean

What is this?

Atomic blender creates a lot of extra materials when importing molecules. This saves time by fixing the materials for you.

Why should I use this?

Atomic Blender adds in a bunch of extra element materials every time a new molecule is imported. This can get kinda unwieldy when you're importing a lot of different molecules into a scene.

To fix the problem, this script finds the 'ball' objects created by Atomic Blender, and collapses their materials down into a single one. It's saved me probably dozens of hours of tedium in changing material names.

In effect, all your Element, Element.001, ..., Element.obscenely_high_number_here materials all get swapped to just Element. Which is useful if all you care about is a uniform look in your renders when it comes to molecules.

How do I use this?

1. Run the code in compactify.py from the scripting window in Blender, and wait a few seconds for your materials to fix themselves.
2. Use the time saved to make yourself a cup of coffee or something.

Known Issues

Make sure you understand this code before running it. It also goes without saying that you should probably back up your blender project when you run this, in case your materials get jumbled up.

That being said, this has a high chance of garbling up your object materials if:

• You've already got other materials that share names with elements in your moleules (e.g. you've already got a material named Gold that you're not using for molecules)
• You've already got other objects with "ball" or "Stick" in their name that weren't created by Atomic Blender