Material Library Management

[bakbek]

I'm pondering this days how to handle all the materials we have and set them up in an orderly fashion. Working with Maxwell or Fryrender we have sort of library manager built in - but with vray in max we have the limited slots and material library files and was wondering how do you handle it - do you save all materials in one file or separate them by categories or just one mat file per material?

Any thoughts about what is best based on actual daily use?

[andrewjohn81]

I'm wondering this as well.

What we had initially talked about here was saving each final project's maps out so we could use them later. It would be easy to see since we have our images organized that way using picasa.
But that sucks. It doesn't really help if you just say, I need a galvanized metal. OK, what the hell was that last project I used that? Shoot.

So I'd be interested to find something good as well.

[davision]

This is a long shot -- but I recommend you complain to Autodesk about their crappy material handling. The guts of the material editor have been the same since 1995 when Max first came out (no exaggeration). I keep asking them for some type of modern library system which tracks date modified, which caches preview thumbnails, has sophisticated search and hierarchical structures but it falls on deaf ears. If more and more users start to raise a stink, maybe they'll actually update the damn thing.

[simmsimaging]

I use Node Joe to build most mats and use that as my library manager as well. I used to keep all my mats in one large file but a) it's cumbersome to find things in and b) sucks badly when it gets corrupted by Max.

I break them out in into categories now and back them up regularly. Works fine for me, and NJ provides a good interface for sorting them out, for the most part anyway. There are some glitches (dragging between libraries changes names etc.) but it's pretty workable for me.

Combine that with Colin's re-link bitmap script and it's pretty painless to move around and update mats.

NJ is an extra cost, but one I found worthwhile.

b

[trick]

You could try MatManager (http://matmanager.110mb.com/).