Preparing a complex model for vray mesh / proxy

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

I have this car, converted from CAD data, so hundreds of objects, a lot of them with their own useless material. I cant and I dont have to go through all the objects and assign the right material, as most of them wont be seen. On the other hand this fact makes the model very heavy. Again, I dont want to go through everything and clean it up, so I thought of using a vrayproxy in my scene, with the car prepared in another. And since at export time I automatically get a multi/sub material, everything should be fine. BUT there are so many materials, that a multi/sub material, which is limited to 100 materials, cant hold all them. funny enough some of the important materials get skipped and thus get a standard grey material assigned. Like e.g. the tires dont get my material assigned to them, but a grey one. I could now go through the each of the 100 materials and check which one I have to switch with my materials, but that is cumbersome. Is there any way to solve this problem in a smart way? Like checking if materials are identical and then automatically joining them together? or something else that I cant think of right now...?
Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!

[glorybound]

There is a script that creates a layer for every material and moves the element to that layer. There is also a script that'll detach all elements by material ID. I detach by material id and then I run the script to move everything to its own layer. I get SketchUp models as you describe and this is how I handle it.

[kosso_olli]

I cant and I dont have to go through all the objects and assign the right material, as most of them wont be seen

From my experience there is no other way. You are opening the box of pandora by keepig all those materials from an unknown source. We have seen the funniest things happening to our renders because of incompatible materials. Since using V-Ray (which is a long time now) every scene had VrayMTLs only, nothing else.
If you dont want to assign every little material, at least apply some basic black plastic VrayMTL to these. That's what we sometimes do in a hurry, and then only shade correctly the parts that can be directly seen.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

Well, the data I got was an fbx and all the materials were then converted into vray materials .So from a technical point of view it shouldnt be a problem .
but you are right that I probably have to select a big part of the objects that I'm sure are not going to be seen and apply one material to them.
Separating all the objects by materials into layers sounds like a sure way to crash 3ds max in this case .