- [Narrator] The Slate Material Editor
is a node-based interface
for designing and editing shading networks
or material shader trees.
In this course, we've seen it a little bit already
when editing environment lighting.
Now we'll start exploring
the Material Editor more thoroughly.
Before you open up the Material Editor,
you should know that by default
it depends upon the active Production renderer.
The Production renderer will be invoked
by the Material Editor
in order to render previews or sample swatches
and also materials and maps that are not marked
as compatible with the current Production renderer
will be hidden within the Material Editor.
Let's investigate.
Open up the Render Setup dialogue,
and we're in Production Rendering Mode.
And the default renderer is Arnold.
That means the Material Editor will use Arnold for previews
and it will hide any materials
or maps that the Arnold developers have flagged
as incompatible.
In the Common tab,
scroll down to the bottom
and you'll see a rollout
at the very bottom Assign Renderer,
open that up.
And here we can assign different renderers
for the Production rendering
the Material Editor or ActiveShade.
And by default,
the Material Editor is locked
to the Production renderer.
And we could unlock that
and choose some other renderer for the Material Editor.
But I do recommend that you just leave that padlock on.
And that way
what you see in the Material Editor
will very closely represent what you'll see
in your final production rendering.
Now let's talk about compatibility.
It may surprise you to hear this,
but big 3D program such as Max
actually has many internal incompatibilities.
Lots of things just don't work
in combination with one another.
And additionally, Arnold is not actually a part of 3ds Max.
It's a plug-in renderer that is developed separately
but bundled with the purchase of 3ds Max.
If we go to the Arnold Renderer tab
up here at the top we see Compatibility Mode
and there are two options.
3ds Max Map Support,
or Arnold Compliant.
It's set to 3ds Max Map Support by default.
This means that Arnold
will be able to render the 3ds Max Legacy Texture Maps
such as Cellular, Smoke and so on.
If Compatibility Mode is set to Arnold Compliant,
then none of those maps will be available
within the Material Editor by default.
And they also definitely will not render in Arnold.
There are only a couple of situations
in which you'd want to switch to Arnold Compliant.
First, if you're rendering on the GPU instead of the CPU,
Arnold GPU rendering does not support
most of the 3ds Max Maps.
You'd also need to switch to Arnold Compliant mode.
If you want to use
the Arnold command line renderer called kick.
So Arnold the core software
does not support the native maps
of the host applications such as 3ds Max
or Maya or Houdini
but the Arnold plugins such as MAXtoA
do support the host applications maps,
at least partially.
The upshot here is that if you're rendering with kick,
then you can't use any of the Max Legacy Maps.
Same goes if you're rendering in GPU,
you're probably not going to be able to use
those 3ds Max Legacy Maps.
So you want to disable them by choosing Arnold Compliant.
But if you're rendering in Max itself
and using the Arnold CPU mode,
then you probably do want 3ds Max Maps Support enabled.
All right, we can close the Render Setup dialogue
and open up the Material Editor
from its button on the main toolbar.
It's right next to the Render Setup dialogue.
When we click that button,
we get the Slate Material Editor by default.
Slate is the node-based interface.
It has an older cousin known as the Compact Material Editor.
I actually don't recommend that
because it's quite limiting.
It's not node based
and it's kind of hard to build a complex shader tree
but you may need to go into the Compact Material Editor
on rare occasions
in order to set some options.
So it's accessed from the Slate Material menus
or from the Material Editor icon.
You can switch the mode over to the Compact Material Editor
in the Slate Material Editor menus,
choose Modes, Compact Material Editor.
And we see that compact interface,
which again does not have any node based graph.
I'll switch back over to Slate.
We can go to the Material Editor button
on the main toolbar,
hold that button down,
and from the fly out choose the Slate icon,
which looks like two checkered circles
connected to a checkered square.
And now we're back in the Slate Material Editor.
Slate is composed of four windows.
The main window includes the title bar,
the menus and the Material Editor toolbar.
It also includes one or more tabs,
which are labeled View.
And that's the main central area here.
This panel where we can build
and manipulate our shader graph.
The other three panels within Slate are also known as tools.
We have the Material Map Browser on the left
and on the right we have the Navigator
and the Material Parameter Editor.
And these can be undocked from the main window
just by clicking
and dragging on their respective title bars.
So I can drag that Material Map Browser out
and float it if I want
or I can drag it back and then dock it
by dragging on top of one of these little boxes
that have arrows.
And I can dock it back to the left.
The Material Map Browser shows a list of materials
and maps that we can create.
It also includes a list of all the Scene Materials
that are currently applied
onto objects in the scene.
And at the very bottom
there's a section labeled Sample Slots.
This is kind of a sandbox area where we can store materials
and maps that will be saved
in our current 3ds Max Scene file
but are not necessarily applied
onto any object in our 3d world of the view ports.
We'll talk more about all of this later.
The Navigator window just gives an overview
of where we are in the main graph.
Just for reference, I'll create a shading node
go back up to the top
to the Materials category under General,
I'll click and drag on this Physical Material
and drop that into the view.
And now we see that material shading node
and we see in the navigator
a representation of that node
and then a red box.
And that red a box indicates
the outlines of the view itself.
And I can navigate in that view in the usual way.
We can pan with the middle mouse button
or we can zoom with Control+Alt and middle mouse button.
We can also do the same things
from these navigation buttons down here.
I'll reset my zoom factor to 100%
from this pull down list here,
we've got a numerical field.
We can just set that back to 100%.
I don't really use the navigator.
In fact, just to save space
and give me more room for the Material parameters,
I'll close the Navigator just by clicking on its little X.
If I needed to that back
I could go into the Slate Material menus
and choose Tools and re enable Navigator.
Materials and maps in the graph view are called nodes
because they're usually connected to one another
in a network.
To view the parameters for any shading node,
just select it.
And its attributes will be loaded into
the Parameter editor on the right.
That's an overview of the interface
for the Slate Material Editor.