Two or more shades of material for creating dental restorations may be used concurrently in a single milling machine by cutting different shaded material blanks into two or more pieces and fitting these pieces together within the working volume of a milling machine. The different shaded pieces may be conjoined using a fixture or the like to retain the pieces in the form of a multi-shaded material blank for use by the milling system. Systems may implement computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programming that is specifically tailored for concurrently or sequentially milling dental restorations having different shades from such a multi-shaded material blank or from two or more pieces of different shaded material blanks, e.g., by automatically or manually tracking the location of different shades of material and mapping the volume of dental restorations into suitable locations within the multi-shaded material blank.
