Exploring the Slate Material Editor - 3ds Max Tutorial

- [Instructor] Hello, we've got our scene set up. We can take a look at the Material Editor proper. Open that up from it's button on the main toolbar, or use the keyboard shortcut which is m. It's called the Slate Material Editor. In fact, there are two flavors of the Material Editor. There's the Slate Material Editor and the Compact Material Editor. The Compact Material Editor is sort of a leftover from the early days of 3ds Max. If for some reason, you want to go back to that, you can choose from the modes menu, to go back to the Compact Material Editor. However, I don't recommend that because you can't really easily visualize your shading network. So, I'm going to always work in the Slate Material Editor. Switch back to that. The Slate Material Editor is divided into a few sections. Over here on the left is the material map browser, which we saw as a floating window in the previous movie, when we chose the environment map for our background here, in our view port. So, Material Map Browser is a list of all the available materials or shaders and all the maps, which can change the various properties of those materials. If we scroll down in the Material Map Browser, there are a couple of other things in addition to the materials and maps. All the way down at the bottom, we have scene materials, and also a section for sample slots. Scene materials are materials that are actually applied onto objects or in this case onto the environment,. Sample slots are sort of a staging area, where you can temporarily store materials while you're working on them, and they'll be saved in your scene even if they're not applied onto any object. The main area is called the view. That's where we can build a graph and visualize the structure of a shading network. Over here, on the right, we have a navigator and a material parameter editor. The navigator just shows you where you are in the view. In order for us to really see that, let's add a new material. I'll scroll back up to the top and we see the section for materials, general, and the first one is physical material. That is an all-purpose physically-based material, which should work with almost any renderer. Drag that over into the view and release the mouse. That new shading note is created. We see in the navigator, this red line indicates the shape of the view itself. Then we have little box indicating that material node. We can use the standard keyboard shortcuts to navigate around in here. Middle mouse to position, and ctrl + alt + middle mouse, to zoom or dolly. We can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in increments. In the lower right corner of the Material Editor, we have some controls. Most significantly, in this case, for me, is the scaling. It's set to a non-100% scale. I'm just going to set that back to 100%. So, that's the view. If you double-click on a note, if you double-click on it's name, then you will load it's parameters over here, in the parameter editor. I don't really use this navigator pane, so I'm going to close that with the little X button in the upper right. If you ever need to get any of these panels back, you can do that from the tools menu. For example, I can choose to redisplay the navigator or hide the navigator. Once we've displayed a materials parameters, we can make changes to it. For example, we can change it's name. Type in a new name, drone chassis. To assign materials, we can select the object or objects and we can assign in a couple of different ways. One is with a material node selected. We can click on assign material to selection and that will assign that material. That changed color subtly. We can see that a little bit more clearly if we go over into the basic parameters, and click on the color swatch. We get the color selector window and then we can change the color to something else and click OK. We can see that, that material has been assigned onto that object. Another way to assign materials is to drag and drop from the output, which is this little dot on the right-hand side. If I select all of the objects in my scene by dragging a selection rectangle, and I can click on the output, and then drag-over to any of those objects and release the mouse. If I selected more than one object, I can choose whether I want to assign to just the object under the cursor, or assign to the entire selection. I'll choose assign to selection and click OK. Okay, that's the ultra-basics of using the Slate Material Editor to create and assign a material.