How to use materials not 'smart' enough for an item?

Ptrope

I really like the Bob Hair that comes with Jasmin, and haven't found any other hairstyles that are similar to it. Unfortunately, I don't want it to look like toon hair - I want to use it like real hair. The blurb in the store says it is square mapped so it can use most such hair materials, but I can't figure out how to make this happen. It seems like the Studio gets in the way of accomplishing much beyond a product's pre-packaged alternatives, counting on the metadata more than the user's own wishes. I haven't yet found a tutorial that seems to address this - to me - basic and obvious desire, so I'm just hunting through the available content and hoping to find something that works, but that's a pretty lousy workflow.

My assumption: locate a hair material (or any material, generally, depending on what I want to change - bricks on a shirt, stars on SkinTorso, whatever), and if I drag it over to the object, I get a pop-up that asks me, down near the boot, "Apply to Bob Hair," which I click. Either nothing seems to happen, or a dialog box pops up that appears to show something being imported, but it's so quick I don't get a chance to really read it. And then nothing is any different.

I just want to drag, say, "GoldenBlond" hair onto the hair object and have it change to GoldenBlond. Why is this such a problem? I don't think I should have to go into the Editor tab and build it from scratch if there are 149 seemingly-unique hair materials in my Materials folder.

mjc1016

I've never found 'drag and drop' to be as easy as it seems it should be...

Have you tried selecting the item, then going to the Surface pane and making sure the particular surface you want to change is selected?

More often than not, if you want to change something, to something other than one of its presets, yes, you need to manually apply the new texture maps and save out a new preset.