3DS Max Tutorial - Basics of the Slate Material Editor

okay we're going to cover the basics of the slate material editor so when you click up here material editor your material that it will come out normally it will be in this compact mode you click on modes up here and you can change the state material editor so here we have various materials made it's a bit bigger okay so in this case I've got this material which is assigned here to this box and I have this gray material assigned to this ball so let's start anew let's delete this for making new view so when you open the slate material editor you only have a blank view here not this you'll have you'll be called view one just like that and it will be here there'll be nothing in it you can zoom out zoom in there's nothing there now you can take your materials here so I've got v-ray as a little bit as a renderer you click and drag and it will create the material in the viewport you can zoom in the same as you zoom in in the max in the viewport you go in and out so it's the same idea of moving around zoom in on that on the wheel of the middle Mouse let's say you are opening someone else's scene and for whatever reason they've deleted this view you've got a blank thing you won't be able to create a material you'll be able to do anything this will seemingly be completely unusable to you nothing comes over even standard materials nothing nothing nothing nothing you can't use the materials you have to click up here and this little rectangle here create a new view you can type in any name so let's say you want to have building materials units for your building materials you click OK you now have a view called that you can create multiple views so maybe you have one for your building materials maybe you have one for your furniture so furniture and you put all your materials your furniture in here and all your materials for your building in here it's up to you if you right click up here you can delete the views now you get a little dialog click OK and that's gone by default this we called the view one you want to change the name of a right-click rename view and by default it feels like that so you take click on your materials drag drop you have the materials over hand you can do this with any material now let's say you've been in your compact remote mode here and you've created a bunch of materials and you want to enter these now in the slate material editor so modes slate material editor it's not obvious at first where they are but if you click here on this drag this slider right down you will find your sample slots from your compact material editor here so if you click here and drag over you've got all of them there then if you want to make a movie you can just double click they will appear or you drag and drop your instance or a copy you can click and you're going to get that once you have material here if you want to select it you can't you know how do you change this how do you edit if you double click on this material anywhere it will appear over here you can double click on the top it will appear okay even if you unselect it afterwards it's still going to be here until you select something else okay so now you've got all of these sample slots and everything else which if you're in preview Creek modes go to compact material editor it's the same as all these basic parameters that you see right here is exactly the same box modes slate but it's over here on the right now this might disappear for whatever reason maybe you click on the X and it's gone so you have these two gold buttons over here that's the parameters so that brings it back now you need to select it again and you have this other one here material/map browser which is over here and again maybe you've clicked on that it gets just disappeared error whatever you click on that again and it will come back ok so you have this slider click and drag the slider you go through everything for your map just standard nut v-ray maps your materials are above them appear now I like to keep these closed and then open them when I'm using them and close them afterwards just so I can see and easily access what I need some people like to keep them open and by default they are open but you end up with a lot of a lot of choice here so yeah I'll click open it up drag what I want and then I'll generally leave it open then we all have very open here and then maps I'll be using a mix of v-ray and standard but that's how that works so now you want to select a material you've got this integral assigned here you don't have it in your viewport you don't have it in your sample spots if you click this button here pick material from object you can then pick it and there's appears right here next seven here put material at the scene now most of the time this will be grayed out and you won't be able to use it this applies when you have two materials with the same name so I'm going to click here and drag this over and this is called material number 13 this is material number 35 now if I give this the same name just by clicking in the top changing it and then I'm clicking outside of the box right if I select this you've got put material to scene now I can do this think about the same name so what it's going to do is it will replace this material with this new material so if I click on that and the thing which had this material on now has this material of course you'd go back and select this material and it's also selected standards that will replace it as well so that's put material to scene it allows you to switch between two materials with the same name now a glitch occurs with this sometimes where you're going to take in material you're going to type in the name you're going to press ENTER and this won't appear so you can't you can't swap between materials you can't do anything and you're wondering what's going on they've got the same name and what's happened is simply a glitch so what you need to do it just select their name select the material which has the name copy that memo name ctrl C go into your new material does it there ctrl v press ENTER now this is selected you don't want to select it so click anywhere in this people outside of materials Bank it's no longer selected and then this will appear so now you'll be able to put them in Terezin that's a simple glitch another thing which you're going to run across when you're using the material editor is sometimes you're going to have more than just one material selected so let's say you have like material in a box whatever reason the material on a bitmap for every reason now nothing you can't assign a material you're trying to figure out what's going or and you are ready for that okay in this case it's simple and you can just click but sometimes you're going to be trying to figure it out because in your mind this is selected it's over here in this box but actually all three of these are selected and it doesn't know what material you're trying to assign to a selection you've got this this this you just need to have the material cited so if this is the case even clicking this you'll be sitting here you'll be clicking on this material it's not make any difference you have to deselect so you deselect by clicking outside of the material then you click on material again and now you can assign the material to selection so that's how that works you click here assign material to selection now if you have two materials are the same and you use this instead of put material to scene you'll say material with the same name where they exist in the scene do you want to replace it or rename this material and you can rename it or you can replace it so by replacing it that's the same as clicking put material to scene we want this one on so let's put this material to see so that's what that is and that's the same material selection this is delete selected so if you are sitting here you want to delete it's gone now if you click on this again it's back so deleting selected let's see if I click on there and I click delete like this okay it's gone from the material and it's no longer assigned so you have to watch what you're doing if you want you can take a whole material like this and delete it then it's still in the scene it's just not new material editor and controls that under that but if you select a bitmap on its own delete then that will adjust the material okay next up is move children so by default I'm sitting here and I'm moving this around and you'll see these children here stay where they are so whatever reason maybe there's other materials here and you know I want to move this whole thing so sometimes it's easier you just click here move children and then everything will move together so that's the use of this button it just allows the whole scene the whole material to move together okay this next one here is hide unused mowed spots so again whatever you have selected you click this and it makes it a much smaller so you can you can fit a lot more materials in the same space and you can see what's going on more these here it also shows you what's connected where again you can click item use no slots mail come back but sometimes you'll press ctrl-a you want to select all your materials and you want to just hide what's like you see just click on that and it will change everything ok next up is show shaded material in viewport so you'll see that right here this red line and this blue line that's showing the shaded material in the viewport so if you turn that off and the longer has a red and blue line and this by default now will be whatever color is a missed diffuse slot so in this diffuse you've got red and that's why it's appearing right if I change this color it would change as well ok right now show background in preview which brings up another point so you can't really see it here if you double click on the picture itself it gets a bit bigger you can zoom in a bit but that's about as far as you can zoom in so that's not really big enough to view it properly if you right click and you click open preview window you get another box you can just click on the edge and drag and that will give you a larger preview so you can see what's going on ie material looks ok I want to see this interview points to show shaded material in viewport and it's now ok show backgrounds sorry clothes don't show this so but here's a show background you can see how this reflections are caring how cool seen the material is and how it will react to other scene materials so that's what this show background in preview it's my turn it off and lose all of those reflections I've got to kind of look at how the grades reflecting here it's not easy to see so that's what that's for ok next if you're when you're rendering you can have your material paths coming out so you can basically if you double click on that picture Vegas for again so this is your material ID channel and that will then allow the material channels to render out so you can do easy post-production in Photoshop or whatever your choice of post-production software is you can change the number but by default this only goes up to 15 so you know you might want to go higher than that you want to have you might if it's 15 and you've got just 50 materials in the scene you're going to have overlapping numbers and so on and so forth so you can override that if you come down here to options you've got here override material effect so by default as off if you turn that and that means this number up here is what's working if you turn that on you can put anything out just drag on change the effect ID number and now you can have hundreds of different material IDs you get many more than just 15 slots which is what I have in there okay the next one here layout all vertical is going to lay out all of your materials within this viewport vertically so you click that and they just all come in the lovely lines so you can see what's going on okay after that you have layout children so let's say you're working and somehow your material then drop something like this and you just like that's in there so you just drag this put it where you want it you click on layout children and they're going to come out nice and laid out there now this is select by material so I'm going to click here on the picked arrow click on here and I get our so now if I say select by material this comes up it selects everything which has this material material number 31 on so select them compose the material is give it all to you to isolate and it shows me oh it's on these two objects and that's same right sometimes you get errors English's because I do not think it's on this object at all it's clearly this one it's on that object so you get these errors of caring at time so it will slightly correctly all right this will occur most often when you have groups they will soak everything in the group so the only solution in this case is to ungroup everything and so you just make sure everything selected group and you click ungroup and you might have to make sure it's all safe instead of clicking do it again the group ungroup now there's a few other things I do you know this has got bitmaps in it so let's take the stem off its material you know I'm going to come here I want to attach the material a bitmap so I click here letsa standard and drag and drop the bitmap into the steroid source logic comes up with this and you can browse to select the material that you want to see so let's pick a leaf put it on with the diffuse and that's now coming through that so that's how you get a bitmap or you get any of the different maps into the scene you just either drag and drop or you double click and they will appear and then you can take them and you can attach them now the other thing you can do is you can drag drag and drop and it's going to ask you what you want so you can click it's the same as selecting it from here on the left but you can now have this little dialog so you can then click standard bitmap select whatever you want for parts here we go we use as a displacement so that's another way of doing it you just drag and drop them you can select only I want to be recolor that's very one that reflects your bossiness v-ray very color and you won't live in that so this is ways how you can create your material now again like I said it's getting messy you press C it's going to lay it all out nicely obviously C is the same here as layout children that's a shortcut for it now there's another thing here which I want to show you to do this for this tree in the scene and let's select release material so this is an old model of a tree you just like the leaf material and what you have is this now you want to change this material illness to be something else doing it to be heavy rate two-sided material so what you're going to do is drag-drop materials v-ray very two ciders permit ale now this is not this it's not the side that I think so now you've got to select this like this and assignment material now there's a problem here and the problem is if you've got tons of things to select you don't want to be creating this new one you don't want to be doing it this way and you don't want to be doing it sorry materials I need for you right here you don't want to be clicking here dragging pulling it over putting it on there and assigning it by clicking there and signing you want to be doing it that way because you've got let's say 20 20 different items and seen over the different tip with this material here signed so the easiest way to do that I'm just going to delete this the easiest way to do is if you right click on it you click change material map type so now it's going to change this material to another one you companies either oh yeah the material I wanted to since we're a two-sided material double click come up this dialog keep opened here in the sub material leave that spec to say okay and now this material is assigned the reason you can't see it is because this material there's too much going on so v-ray to calculate which one you want to see so you need select relief material click here show shaded material in viewport and it will ask you what do you want to see it so I've just created these different Vario two sided materials now here it's called leaf material so we're going to just show on that one and you can see it so that's it really you have to kind of maybe be very careful because this has a name leaf material and now this new one has the same name so let's change that because that can cause errors later on yeah so that's that the two things are using on right-click really change material map type as you just saw an open preview window so you can click and drag and get a bigger preview now if you do right click here and you get all of these other options you'll see these are the same options that you get here these are the same options you get from up here and so I don't really go into this you can feel free but we've already covered the use of these different ones by going through this hair I'm just going to go through a couple points up here which to use okay tools you have navigator brings up this little box here so you can just drag around and it will be as big as the art what I have whatever materials you have so you can drag around see what materials you have so that can be really useful you might have a material off in the side somewhere and you don't know it's there but so this can definitely be useful tools navigator okay now they're hanging options propagate materials to instances I am turning this on and off all the time so what that means is to assign the same material to all the instances so let's just give you an example you have a box you have it here we're going to just make a few instances instance okay we've got four instances here so I've got one selected I've got this leaf material that we made so we're going to assign that so with options propagate materials to instances it will put them on everything so so you got a bunch of chairs you know you go sweetmeat it's our leather material on Simon tilted selection they all get it controls that out and do that okay now if I do turn it off or mean these instances you put different materials on there so I can assign this one to that one I can take this I can select another material and assignments that instance and another material and assignments for that counselors I can take another instance and assignments for that I can take another instance and assign it to this one so basically you just end up with different instances on different materials sorry different materials on the same instances and the way you do that is through this so turn that on and off as needed the reason I like the slate material editor made it much more than the compact material editor now is simply because I can look at the material and I can now instantly what's going on you'll see what materials are going what bitmaps are going into where and how it's all laid out and that's incredibly useful now if you want to create a bit better you go ahead and standard you get a bitmap you pull it over you drag and drop it you choose something and then you can assign it to any spot you just click in this little you do click this little circle and you can drag and drop and it goes in so that's really all you all there is to it so you have cellular you want to put it in the bump spot you click here you drag it over you can just drag this up to the bump let go I know while you sleep on there so you double click on there it comes up here and you can do all of your adjustment same as before for that bag so that's really all there is to it it's very simple to use a slate material editor

Channel: leonleon51

Views: 3,554

Keywords: 3DS Max, Autodesk, slate, material, shader, tutorial, modelling, vray, mental ray, render, renderer, slate material editor, Vray material editor, v-Ray

Id: aGSPvL4fVkk

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2017