Working with the Whiteboard Material Editor in 3DS Max 2011

3DS Max 2011 has been around for a while now and one of its new features was the updated interface for the material editor: Slate. This is a move towards a node-based system; something that many other programs (Maya, XSI, Blender, Shake, Fusion, Nuke, etc.) have been running for a while and a method that is generally considered efficient and intuitive… but is it?

Well, the old material editor in Max had a couple of problems – the need to reset material slots if you went past 24 mats always bothered me, as did the way you had to click on everything to get to settings. ‘deep’ in complex materials. . However, one big thing he had going for him was familiarity; I had been using it for about 10 years, so despite the quirks of it, I knew what I was doing with it… and then Slate came along.

I have to say that I found it to be an uphill struggle at first, the very different appearance of everything was quite off putting and my first reaction was that it didn’t really add anything productive to your workflow. After a day or so of perseverance, I started to see the benefits and haven’t looked back since, and what makes it so great? Well, like I said, I found it a bit hard to figure out at first (and several colleagues still don’t see the point in moving away from the old system), so I thought I’d check some of the things out. I’ve picked up some of the key features from my perspective:

Work area.

That first problem with the old material editor (now called the “compact material editor”) about running out of mat slots is gone, since the workspace you have to place your materials on is huge. Using the new space available, it is now possible to create hundreds of mats in the same place; although in terms of organization that can be confusing. To combat confusion with complex scenes, you have the option to create new workspaces to keep things organized, these just sit at the top as tabs so you can toggle between them.

Personalized design.

The layout of Slate when I first opened it wasn’t to my liking, but luckily if you click on any of the standard windows and drag them, you’ll see some highlighted positions, drag the selected window to the position you want and leave it there. One feature I really like is the option to add a custom material group that you can drag all your most used items into, this saves a lot of time as choosing from the standard dropdowns you start with can be a bit disconcerting. , having a custom set to choose from is much easier.

Everything at a glance.

This addresses my earlier comment about handling complex materials, the new node-based view means you can immediately see what your material settings are. No more clicking through channel after channel of mats and sub-mats to find out what’s going on, it’s all there for you to see. Another benefit of this is that if you use the same map in multiple places, you can simply drag the wire to multiple slots/materials at once; it’s basically the same as instantiating, but it’s a much neater way to do it.

Extra goodies.

There are some other really useful little things in Slate too; the option to load all scene materials into the workspace at once is useful, as are the node/child layout options (the option to reorder everything vertically can be very useful if things start to get a bit messy ), the browser window and the search function integrated directly into the material map browser window. I really love the way matlibs work now though, just click the arrow to the left of the search bar and select ‘open material library’, select one and it opens over your custom set and you can drag mats to the work area; when you’re done, just right-click the library and close it. You can also open scenes as matlibs by changing the ‘Files of type’ dropdown in the Open window; this is very useful as you can get quick access to previously used mats without having to add them to a custom library.

Space invader.

One thing with the Slate is that it takes up a lot of screen space, it’s lovely to use it with a dual monitor setup (you really need full screen in my opinion), working on one screen is possible of course, but it’s a bit cramped and had to constantly resize and move the window to see what was going on… the ‘compact’ title for the old stuff editor is very apt!

I personally think Slate is a huge improvement over the old material editor and as my first experience with a node based system I have found it to be efficient and intuitive. I’d say it’s a great addition to Max, I hope development continues and new features are added to further improve the material creation workflow.