Saving Material Libraries in Max 2011

[Paul Twyman]

Hey,

 

So I am loving Slate and all the new features but have I missed it or is there now no simple way to say save all the materials in a scene to a .mat

 

In the old material map browser you had the option to save as for

 

scene

active slot

material editor

selected

 

which allowed you to save a material or all materials to a .mat directly.

 

The only way I can see to save all the scene materials to new material library is to create new group import them all in individually and then save as. Or to individually add them to an existing .mat you have open.

 

Please tell me I have missed this option somehow???

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

You can restore the old Mat/Map browser following the directions I posted in this AREA thread.

 

-Eric

[Paul Twyman]

Cool thanks, I will give that a go.

 

Could work well if it keeps the old browser for the compact and the new for slate but it's not really a long term solution.

I really like the new material browser but just wish it had those options. Hopefully they will add them again, can't believe they got rid of them.

 

Thanks again

 

Paul

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[John Pruden]

What I'd like to see is a way to save your favorite materials in a custom menu on the left side panel. You can make custom menus or your favorite map "types" and material "types" like noise, or VrayMat, but you can't create a material and then save it there for later use. I think that would be a really nice feature, and I'm quite sure you can do that with ZooKeeper. That said I'm REALLY surprised there's no easy way to save out a .mat file of your scene materials. I'll have to check out your thread in the AREA. Thanks!

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

A little maxscript and you can do some amazing things.

for mat in scenematerials do append currentmateriallibrary mat

This will create a temporary material library containing all scene materials.

 

-Eric

[John Pruden]

ooh... good call on the maxscript. but I'd assume when you make your own menus of favorite maps and material types, that that information gets stored in another virtual array or something?? can maxscript be used to load complete materials into one of those custom menus??

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

You can't put customized materials into the standard groups, unless they are scripted plugins or something like that. You would need to use a customized material library instead. Think of Material Libraries as single level groups, the only difference is that it shows LIB on the right hand side.

 

-Eric