You can save time and work more efficiently by re-using Material Properties settings.

Example:

You’re working on creating a library with different stone types. There’s an existing marble material that has good settings for specular, reflection, opacity, and bump effects that you want to apply to several sorts of granite and limestone to finish the library.

To do so, follow these steps:

1. In the Material Lab, open your reference material (in our example, marble) in the Thumbnails area. This will show all the material properties on the left hand side.
2. Open the folder on your computer or shared location where you have stored your other stone materials (in our example, granite and limestone) and select the materials that you want to apply the properties to.
   
   Note that you can do a multiple select with the Ctrl+Click or the Shift+Click commands.
3. Drag the files to the Material Lab and drop them onto the Primary Color preview box. The materials that you imported to the Material Lab are now added in the Thumbnails area, and they each have inherited the properties of the reference material. Note how the file name begins with the name of the reference material, followed by the name of the material that was imported.
4. You can now modify and rename each material as you wish. Note that you can re-use and apply the bump settings of an other material by dragging and dropping this material onto the Bump preview box.
5. Remember to save each material that you want to keep!