Noob question about material libraries

[xj0hnx]

Hello.

So I have a few .mats that I have collected, scattered around in a couple folders. Easy enough to find them and open them up, but I would like some of them to be included in the Material Editor so I can simply click on Mtl Library, instead of Open and then navigating to the file, they would be included in the 3dsmax.mat file.

Can I do that with the Merge button? Or some other way?

[geldslaw]

you can, you can create your own material library for individual projects or your own specialist collection. You can choose to add to the library or merge libraries, better to build your own collection but as you get familiar and start collating materials you'll want to break them down and specialise because your material library will become an extremely important asset.


but don't fret too much over it at the moment, you'll know what you want to do as you gain more experience, you'll be constantly going back and rearranging the library as you collect other libraries and more materials.

But sounds like you're off to a good start, so keep it up.

[xj0hnx]

Thanks For now I am just going to move everything into one folder so I don't have to do the directory dance every time I want to find something. It's just annoying because I have some materials that are single files, it's be nice to put them in a bigger group. I looked through a couple manuals, but can't seem to find anything on adding individual mats to a existing .mat file.

[Doofus]

The highlighted icon copies the current material into the currently open material library and gives you the option of renaming it on the way.
Also the resource collector utility (found under the hammer icon, then more...) is very useful for bringin random parts scattered around your hardrive together into one place.

For example, you could build your library of materials with the textures scattered all around your harddrive.
Make a single max scene with lots of spheres in it, each sphere textured with one of the materials from your library.
Then run resource collector to gather all the used textures within the scene into one folder, updating the materials along the way.
RESULT - One folder with all relevant textures, gathered from around your harddrive all in one neat material library.

Once you have this set up it is well worth maintaining. You will save yourself unbelievable amounts of time by having a well organised texture library at your fingertips rather than having to hunt around everytime for that image that you know you had once but can't remember where you put it.