“The plan: make sure the materials have the correct texture maps.
The implementation: rougher than I thought.
Having some prior experience I thought I knew the inner workings of 3ds max’s material system. I soon learned that 3ds max has a way of humbling you.
I applied a physical material to a single side of a cube. Being naive, I assumed Max would create a single submaterial. Lo and behold when I investigated in the material editor, there were six sub materials staring back at me. “Why did it create six sub materials instead of one?” you ask. It was a question that led me scouring through the dense autodesk documentation. And I found the answer.
Apparently this is how materials have always worked. Max has always created ids for each face when applying materials. But in the past, the inner workings were kept hidden. In recent versions of 3ds Max the UI better shows the sub materials because modern materials are more complex. Also, I didn’t know scripting that well so I would have never been exposed to this quirk
Materials aren’t going to be applied to different subobjects in my workflow. Nonetheless, this was an interesting side quest.”
