Hi,
I'm working on an interesting project but I have a ton of tedium ahead of me if I don't find a better way to accomplish it.
I have bunch of equally sized planes. Each one needs a unique ambient map, alpha map, and displacement map. The mapping is simple:
--The planes are square.
--The map images are square.
--I just need to "fill" each plane with the 3 unique map images.
The compact material editor has a limit of 24 visible materials. (Argh, why so low?) I know I'm not limited to the amount of texture maps in my scene (at least I don't think so) but it's hard to manage.
I find the Slate material editor to be a pain in its own way, since it requires so much dragging, rearranging, and clicking. I also keep accidentally overwriting old texture maps with new ones with it.
Is there a good script/plugin for bulk mapping unique textures to objects?
Ideally something that would let me set up some kind of "name-matching." (Like if I have a plane called "Plane 005" it would scan my map folder and look for "Alpha 005" and put it in the Alpha slot, same for Ambient and Displacement. With perfectly systematic texture/plane naming, this would be awesome!)
If not, I'd settle with the ability to pull ALL unique Max objects into the Slate material editor via material ID and auto-arrange the panels. That would at least save some time.
I need to do this with potentially thousands of textures, so I'm willing to go through some work to set up a better way to do this! I'm even willing to learn what I need to in MAXscript to make that happen, but I'm not sure it's even possible.
Thanks,
~Kirsten