Apply a material to a heirarchy I have an imported model with a hierarchy of objects.
Expanding to the tip of one branch looks like:


I'd like to be pick materials for sections of the hierarchy (e.g. by top level parents). But it seems that I can't apply a material to an Empty, and I presume in Blender that applying a material to a parent does not act on the material of the child.

What is the best way to go about this?

Further notes:


The meshes already have materials from the import, I'd need to override these (can just delete the materials)
I could do with python if the interface doesn't handle this use case
Right click and 'Select hierarchy' gets me half-way there. But since this selects the Empty's also, the material tab is still hidden.
Use "Material Utils" addon, bundled with Blender. It can reassign material to all selected objects at once

More details here: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/Materials_Utils