Is there a way to merge multiple identical materials Models I am provided with often have tons of tons of materials which tends to hang my host app. I used to go around this via Select > Select all by type > Mesh and clicking "Join" in the Tools tab.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for my latest model: "No mesh data to join".
I've opened the MTL file in a text editor and noticed over 3400 "newmtl" definitions and most of these are duplicates, for example there are 1852 instances of:  

Ks 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Tf 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
map_Kd ff_644.png  

All starting with a different name after "newmtl ".

I could theoretically remove the duplicate material definitions in .MTL and then re-assign the different material names in the .OBJ to match the one that's been left as a source but the whole method is a damn hassle and not a real solution to be honest.

Is there any decent way to clean this mess up? 

Thanks in advance!
Have you tried this ...


Create a box object and apply a materials to it.
Select all the other mesh object that has multiple materials you don't want in your scene.
Select the newly created box object last. (Important select the box last)
Hit CtrlL, select material from the drop down list.
All your meshes should have the newly created box's material.
Save your file, Close it and reopen it to refresh the data cache.
Export the file to any appropriate format you may need.