Missing/Rogue Materials in 3DS Max Scenes
Recently I was on a mission to cleanup the regurgitated mess that is the console.log file. It was complaining that 3 DTS file were searching for 2 specific textures… anyway, this sometimes happens.
During your work flow of creating a DTS you may apply a dummy texture or create more than one Material. Now something to be keep in mind is that Max has an interesting way of handling textures/materials and even if you simply delete the maps, links or material on a material ball it does not necessarily mean its been deleted from your scene. This sets your scene up for a potential danger; that even though a material is not linked to any mesh or polygon it may still be stored in the scene and exported by the Torque Exporter.
So how do you find and kill these hidden annoying textures or materials?! Its actually pretty simple, but as a colleague of mine said to me once, ‘btw – this is the world builders nightmare 
stray textures’… so its good to have a quick, simple method and heres one for you.
- Determine which material or texture is causing the problem…..
- Hit the ‘Get Material’ button. Its on the Material Editor and looks like a Blue Ball with an Arrow pointing at it.
- This will pull up the Material/Map Browser… next thing you need to click is the ‘Scene’ radio button on the left, under the ‘Browse From:’ section. This will pull up every map and material applied to a mesh in the scene. It will also show you which Materials are applied to which Meshes.
This should allow you to examine you scene and easily find and destroy any buggy maps or materials…
Well again, I hope this is helpful!!! Have a good one!!
See Also:
Delete All Missing Materials & Texture Files from Scene
Note:
This post has become rather popular, yet was originally written for people working with the Torque Game Engine. However I would really like to know your circumstances, in terms of why you found this post, because I would like to write an extended post, covering more aspects of the Material Manager. So please leave a comment telling me about your situation so I can expand this post. Thanx
Related Posts:
- Delete All Missing Materials & Texture Files from Scene
- XRef in Max 9 with Nool DTS Exporter
- XRef and My Workflow
Tahnks for posting
thanks but didnt find this very helpful and there isn’t much on the subject around. Maps can be missing but not show up as such under the asset tracker, bitmap/photo path editor etc just by being hidden deep in an xref’d file or vrayproxy such as inside their individual max file in the environment slot etc. I hate max’s way of dealing with maps.. especially when it comes to backburner. If someone knows a way of max showing you which piece of geommetry has missing maps or incompatible ones, then please do share. The above method only works for extremely simple small scenes and i’ve been stuck the last two days trying to find missing maps doing everything even trying Super Mat Pro and Bitmap Reassign scripts to no avail.
Hey George!!
Don’t have any experience with VRay, so can’t help you on that front… Sorry!
But you are 100% right, an XRef’d file will bring all of its materials into the XRef scene. This can complicate life in terms of finding those Rogue Materials.
Which version of Max are you working on? This tut was written for Version 7, however I have upgraded to Version 9 and will be testing this system out on the new Version!!
It definitely is a bit of a buggy side within max!!!
ps. I don’t think there is a way to specifically pinpoint the part of the mesh causing the problem…
Thanks for this. Materials management is definitely part of MAX that is poorly implemented. ‘glad to see I’m not the only one who has been struggling with this particular issue.
Hey!! Glad to see the post has helped you out
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