Bonjour Wurp,
You are not forced to select object to apply or change their materials. Open the Explorer, and expand the objects you want to apply a material. You'll see a blue ball with an italic word saying Scene_Material. Click on this ball and click yes if you have a pop-up message. You can now edit the material and change it quickly in the same manner. It is always a good idea to rename the material.
But this control is a bit limitating. It is annoying to open the material, to click on the icons to access different levels of the material, and so on. To really take advantage of the materials, you have to use the Render Tree. The Render Tree is a graphical representation of how the materials are applied on your object.
When you applied a material to the object, select the object in object mode, and hit 7. This will bring the Render Tree for the selected object. You should have something like a green button (called a node) named Phong with 3 red arrows plugged into an orange node with the name of the material. I wont develop here on how to use this. But the principle is this: anything you want in the material can be plugged somewhere and has its own node. For example, if you have a picture in the diffuse, you'll have a Tree like this:
mypicture_pic -> image -> phong (diffuse input) -> mymaterial
Here are some links to learn more about the Render Tree:
http://www.edharriss.com/tutorials/tutoria...erials\_xsi.html
http://www.aldis.org.uk/TutorialsPage.htm
http://www.joncrow.com/tutorials/xsi\_tuts/...ertree\_page.htm
Finally, for the shading sphere, XSI offer something more powerful than a simple sphere. It is a rendering that you can do directly in the viewport. Hold Q, and drag to create a square around your object in the camera viewport. Your object will render. You can adjust the quality of this rendering by playing with the slider at the right of the render region. Any change you apply on the material will redraw the region (this can be turned off). Also, if you want the render region to focus on one set of parameter (for example, you just want to see the checkedboard you applied without all the bumps and the specular), open the Render Tree, hit P, then click on the node you want to emphasize. You'll see that in the render region only this node renders. Click on another node to see it render in the render region. Hit P again to quit this single preview mode. When you want to hide the region, hold Q again and middle-click in the region.
I, too, was used to work with a shading ball (in SI3D and 3ds max), but now I find it much better to use the render region, because you're not forced to do a full preview each time, and you actually see the materials on the object.
Hope this helps!
Salutations - Cheers
Bernard Lebel