Material Name Character Limit - 63 is too small

Archive User Feedback
1

Hi all.

Material name lengths have an upper limit of 63, which is fine for most cases but those of us to work on mods for IDTech games (Doom 3, The Dark Mod etc) sometimes run in to this problem:
Material names have to be in the form of path, e.g. Textures\wood\panels\OrnatePanels…

Those paths are necessary for sorting and finding things, but in some cases the path length is over 63 characters long, which Blender doesn’t support.

This can make it hard to work with existing materials and various import/export scripts. Increasing the limit to 128 or 256 would probably eliminate the problem and allow things to run much more smoothly.

8 Likes
2

I’m in the same situation as you.
The game engine needs full path of the material. Now with blender I cannot do that.
So,I need to deal with the risk of messing up the whole project.
If you work alone, blender is fine but if you work with hundreds of people blender is not that fine.

3

Bump. The limitation is still present.
image

It would be nice to see an increase in this limit.

2 Likes
4

I mean … it’s not a real solution to the problem and the 63 char limit should be lifted if possible but until then could you maybe work around this with a custom property, somehow?
Yeah - sorry JUST realized how old your reply was. XD

5

A while ago I wrote an addon which does that. Materials for the game/mod are defined in plain text files, and the addon uses the texture in Blender to work out what mod material it belongs to, and then sets the material name in Blender. This allows exporting to work properly.

If the material name has more than 63 chars the addon gives a clear warning and stores the full name in a custom property.

We can export using the .lwo format, and someone else in the modding group wrote a modified exporter, but I’m not sure if that works around the character limit, but it shouldn’t be necessary. A Blender dev just needs to increase a number somewhere :pray:

6

Im trying to rename materials in blender 3.2.2 so the limitation still exsits right? Any workaround? I need the material name long due to the pipeline im implementing T.T

7

While in past years we sometime let feature request style topics slide, these days we can’t anymore, best place for these things would be using the rightclickselect site.