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I finished joining meshes together. Before I closed Blender, I know the material names were appearing. Then I closed Blender and re-opened it. All of the material names are blank. It also appears Blender won't let me name the materials which are blank. enter image description here

Switching back and forth between Cycles Render and Blender Render yields the same results. Using Blender 2.77a

TTTTTTa
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  • I was able to create a repro for this issue. The details are here: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/66114/material-names-missing – TTTTTTa Oct 31 '16 at 03:01
  • This was a known bug in 2.77a. https://developer.blender.org/T49228 I now installed Blender 2.78a and the issue is resolved by using the new version of Blender. The material is now saved and loaded correctly. – TTTTTTa Oct 31 '16 at 03:46

2 Answers2

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This was a known bug in 2.77a. https://developer.blender.org/T49228

I now installed Blender 2.78a and the issue is resolved by using the new version of Blender. The material is now saved and loaded correctly.

TTTTTTa
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You are confusing Materials with Material Slots

  • Material slots are part of the mesh data and hold information about which face gets assigned which material

  • Materials hold the actul surface shading data (color, roughness, reflectivity, emission, etc.)

Material slots can't really be named and only hold face data.

In your case your mesh has several material slots where you can assign materials, but only one (the one with the name) really has one material assigned, the others are empty.

You most likely lost your materials when joining meshes and used as 'master mesh' an object without materials.

To get them back either go to an earlier version of the model (if you kept any saved) or try the backup file ##.blend1 or ##.blend2 if haven't saved over it yet, otherwise it will no longer hold a version with materials.

Duarte Farrajota Ramos
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  • I can't reproduce what happened here again. There were five meshes that were joined. All of them had one material assigned in the slot. After the join, all the of the material slots were carried over to the joined mesh, so there is five in total. Why the material didn't carry over along with the slots makes little sense. – TTTTTTa Oct 29 '16 at 12:22
  • Not sure if this is quite the same as that which happened to me but I recovered each material slot name (for different surfaces) by expanding the menu slot just below your red square and selecting them back again, one at a time. Select the face(s) in EDIT MODE, and click on the "Assign" button. – Edgel3D Oct 29 '16 at 17:38
  • I tried what you said, it didn't work. Anyways I just re-created the materials again so this is not really that big of deal. I've been trying to reproduce what happened and can't, so maybe it was just a fluke. Or it's possible I accidentally unlinked certain materials by hitting the wrong keys and not realizing it. But I did find another topic related to the fact that to do something like this you need to save the file, close blender and re-open the file. http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5300/how-can-i-remove-all-unused-materials-from-a-file – TTTTTTa Oct 30 '16 at 00:14