- [Man] In the previous movie,
we saw that scene materials assigned
to 3D objects are listed in their own area
in the material map browser, labeled scene materials.
We can also have materials in the graph
that are not assigned to objects.
And you might think that that would be a way
that you could build up a library.
In other words, you could have a bunch
of materials in the graph here.
Some of them assigned to objects
and others just kept in a staging area
or a holding area until you're ready to use them.
However, you will find that if you try
to do this it will not work very well.
You will eventually hit a performance wall.
When the view is cluttered up with too much stuff,
it will actually slow down 3ds Max.
There's a better way to do this, down here at the bottom
of the material map browser, we have the sample slots.
I'll open that up and these are pretty large compared
to the material map browser itself.
There are actually a bunch of these
but we can only see a couple of them right now.
I'm going to free up some space
by minimizing these other parts of the material map browser.
I'll minimize the materials and the scene materials
and I'll expand the size of the sample slots area
by dragging on its bottom edge.
Bring that out.
And these are going to render.
We'll see, it took a moment for those to kind of catch up.
So we see that we have four rows top to bottom.
If we expand the size of the material map browser
by dragging on its right edge, we'll see
that we have six columns for a total of 24 sample slots.
And these allow you to store a material or a map
that's saved into the 3ds max scene file the doc max file
but it doesn't have to be assigned
onto any object in the scene.
And it doesn't have to be stored in the graph view either.
This is very helpful especially for creating variations
and backups.
Let's illustrate, I'll open up the scene materials
and I'll bring this back down to a reasonable size
and I'll bring over the file cabinet material.
So click and drag on the file cabinet and then drag it
over into the graph and we'll choose instance.
And we can zoom in here
to a hundred percent hand with the middle mouse button.
Now we're working on the version of that file cabinet.
That is actually instanced into scene.
If I make changes here, it'll affect the scene.
I can illustrate that
by bringing the base color weight down to zero.
We see that there's a live connection here.
All right, I'll bring that base color weight back up to one.
If I want to make a backup or variation on this material
then I can store it in a sample slot
to store anything in the at sample slot
just drag from its node output on the right hand side.
Click and hold the mouse button down and drag
and then drag over to a sample slot.
And you'll see a red line, release the mouse
and we get the instance copy dialogue.
Do we want to create an instance or a copy?
I'll choose instance and click okay.
And now what appears in the sample slot
is actually the material that's in the scene.
And I know that because there are are little brackets
in the corners of that sample slot
and those brackets indicate a so-called hot material.
It's when it does exist in the scene.
Having made that backup, even
if I assign some other material to the file cabinets
and delete this one from the graph, therefore erasing
that material completely I still have the backup copy here
in the sample slots.
All right, let's make a variation on this.
I can make a clone by using the shift key,
hold down shift and click and drag to make a clone.
And now I've got an identical copy
but this new copy is not instanced into the scene,
but I can actually use this to replace the material
that's in the scene.
I just have to assign the same name
as the material that's already in the scene.
So this is the one
that's instanced it's labeled file cabinet.
This is the copy.
I'm going to rename it also
to the exact same name, file cabinet.
And having done that, I'll make some change.
Let's change the color
click on the color swatch, let's make it pink.
And we can now assign this new pink variation
onto all the file cabinet objects.
To make that assignment we want to make sure
that we have the new material selected
and you might need to click off
of it and click on it again to select it.
And then there will be a button here
on the material editor toolbar, put material to scene,
click on that.
And now the file cabinets, turn pink.
And that was all
because we used the same name on both of these materials.
If I select the other material
and click that button once again,
I reassign the original version.
So if I also make a backup of this version of file cabinet
by dragging its output onto a sample slot choosing instance.
Now, since I have those saved into the sample slots.
No matter what I do, I can always get back
to these variations and I can always reassign them
to the objects because I've chosen to name them identically.
Now, if you use the sample slots a lot
you may eventually run out of them
because they're only 24
in a case such as that you can save an external file
called a material library.
We'll take a look at that in the following movie.