Maestri on the Material Editor

Here are some highlights from Maestri's tour of the Material Editor in Max:

Bring up the Material Editor either by selecting Rendering > Material Editor from the main menu bar at top of screen; by typing M on the keyboard; or by clicking on the Material Editor button.

Materials are collections of attributes: maps, shaders, etc.

It's possible to change the number of materials displayed in the Material Editor (number of rows and samples). The number of available materials is effectively unlimited.

To load in a material, click the Get Material button, which is on the left below the material samples. This brings up the Materials and Maps Browser.

To select a material for use, click and drag it from the material library over a sample in the Material Editor.

Click, drag, and drop from the sample to the desired object in your project to assign the material. Click the Show Map in Viewport button to display the material once assigned.

There are many rollouts below the material samples and the control buttons. The first of these offers a choice of Shaders. Shaders control how the surface of an object reflects/refracts/interacts with light.

Choosing the Blinn Basic shader, we next see the Blinn Basic Parameters rollout. There are options here for Color, Self-Illumination, and Specular Level.

We can use other shader types as well:

Anisotropic

For metals, offering good control of specularity, or the amount of light reflected as the object is viewed from various angles.

Metal

Not much used anymore.

Multi-Layer

Allowing two types of anisotropic shading, as in undercoated car paint.

Oren-Nayer-Blinn

A less metaillic shader good for cloth, skin, and other fairly flat surfaces.

Phong

A fairly standard computer graphics shader.

Strauss

A combination of Metal and Blinn.

Translucent

For glow-in-the-dark effects.