3d max - question about materials

Gerbeiter

I have 1 multi/sub-object and 1 standard material in my scene.
In multi/sub-object I have 20 textures (diffuse color), every texture has different ID.

is it possible to join this standard material to multimaterial in that way, that the texture from standard material will have 21st ID in multimaterial and automatically object (which had previously the standard material) will have the multimaterial with ID=21 ?

Is it possible to do it in some easy way? maybe by one click?

Mimp

Can you not add an extra slot to your multi/sub, and put the standard material into the new slot?

Gerbeiter

yes I can do it, but I want to have one multimaterial (no others) in the scene, becouse I want to avoid a mess (I will import a lot of object with singles standard material). And when I put standard material to new slot of multimaterial , I have to manually assign multimaterial to the object and change its ID anyway

Mark Dygert

Option 1:
You can join the objects together and then break them off again.

Advantage: The the standard materials are joined to the multi sub and the mat ID is changed automatically.

Disadvantage: The joined objects will inherit the pivot of the object they are joined to. If this is a problem To get around this you probably want to snap/align the new object to a old, so their pivots are exactly the same. That way when you split them off again the pivot is right where you want it to be.

Import> align> attach> detach.
(This definitely could be scripted to streamline the process)


Option 2:
Script a button to take the material applied to your currently selected object, add it to the multi-sub of your next selected object and append the mat ID of the first without joining them.

Advantage: You get exactly what you want. If you've never scripted before this could be fairly easy to do as a first script.

Disadvantage: You have to script it, find someone to do it for you, or hope that someone already did it.