Shout3D™ 2.0 - 3D Studio MAX Export Tutorial

Using Multiple Materials

The Export Plugin supports multiple materials and smoothing groups on a single object. Let's check this out.

Create a Sphere object of any size in MAX and collapse it to an Editable Mesh. In the Editable Mesh panel, assign the faces on the right and left halves to different Material ID's.

Create a Multi/Sub-Object material in the MAX Material Editor and put it to the object. Assign different diffuse colors to the two halves. Export the scene to the models directory under the name ball.s3d. Use the Wizard to view the scene in an ExamineApplet. The result should resemble the image on the right.

Open ball.s3d in a text editor and note the two MultiApperance nodes containing the two material definitions. Look for the apperanceIndex to see how all of the faces in the model are assigned either MultiAppearance 0 or MultiAppearance 1. These correspond to Materials ID's 1 and 2 in MAX.

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