material temporary overide???

[BrianKitts]

Does anyone know of a way to do a temporary overide on a material set for max? (realize I am doing this for a vray thing.... but I think the solution will come from a max capability if it exists)

 

THE IDEA... I want to be able to create a group of obects and assign a material to it for a temporary amount of time. After which I want to ungroup them and have all of the original materials assigned to the objects to still exist.

 

THE ACTUAL USAGE.... I want to select all the site elements, group them, assign a simple gray material and assign a vray alpha contribution of -1.0 matte. Once I get that rendered with the proper alpha mask I want to be able to remove the gray material and ungroup it all back to the original.

 

I realize this could be done by saving the scene to a new file and applying said maidifications, then reopening the original after rendering as wanted is complete. But I don't want two different files everytime I change something in one file and then have to update the other, and verse visa.

 

any thoughts?? thx

[Verma]

Under Vray Global Switches rollout, you'll find a setting called "override mtl". This lets you replace material for all objects with any 1 particular material (usually you want a simple grey material for this).

 

Hope that helps.

[BrianKitts]

yes that one I know about, but that's a full scene over-ride, I just need to control a part of the scene..... such as I want to gray the whole site, but not the building

[jvlive]

Does your version of max have Scene States?

(tools menu>manage scene states)

Intro from the help file:

"Scene States offer a fast way to save different scene conditions with various lighting, camera, material, environment, and object properties that can be restored at any time and rendered to produce numerous interpretations of a model."

I tried playing with it a while back, but i got confused. Maybe i was just lazy, it looks like a useful tool.

[BrianKitts]

forgot about seeing a tutorial one time on that, yeah that would totally be an option. thanks!