topic Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standard' in 3ds Max Forum

Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standard'

Anonymous — Tue, 17 May 2016 08:11:51 GMT

Hello,

I am using 2017 Max and there in the Material Editor window it is always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standard'.

Every time I have to go and manually search the Satndard in order to make that Standard.

I am using NVIDIA Mental Ray as Renderer. Is there any way to default the editor to Standard all time?

Thanks,

Abhisek Guha

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Stefan_L — Tue, 17 May 2016 10:20:50 GMT

MAX loads its default material library from here:

C:\Users\ * your user name * \AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2017 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\defaults\DesignVIZ.ART

or a similar location, depending on your selected Custom UI and Defaults.

There you'll find a file called MEDIT.MAT which you can change at will.

The CurrenDefaults.ini file in the same location contains this section which obviously controls the default material taste, here set to Physical Material:

[100 C80 0]
; Arch & Design Material (mi) - 0x70b05735 0x4a163654
; Physical Material - 0x3d6b1cec 0xdeadc001
materialType=0x3d6b1cec 0xdeadc001

But I didn't try that yet...

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Anonymous — Mon, 23 May 2016 10:09:12 GMT

I found the location and the exact file as you mentioned, then I changed the "Physical Material" to Standard but still it is showing Physical.

Not sure if Render Setting has anythinig to do with it.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Stefan_L — Mon, 23 May 2016 10:29:05 GMT

A material defined as Physical Material will not change to another type by changing the default material type. And I'm glad about that 🙂

I don't know what exactly you are doing. But if you overwrite the MEDIT.MAT your system uses with your newly created materials MAX will load them the next time.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

rendermaster — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 13:07:38 GMT

just simply go to Customized Menu --Custom UI and default Switcher and select your preferred UI

if your problem still there, after selecting your preferred UI, save your scene with a file name as MAXSTART, save it to your preferred location( default is at C:\Users\XXX\Documents\3dsMax). Then check your user path

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Yuhg — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 22:31:40 GMT

Thanks for the response but this in fact does not work. I haven't tried it with standard materials as they are useless to me.

I work with Vray and maxstart for whatever reason refuses to accept the change when made to populate all slots with Vray materials.

However, if anyone else is having this problem, then the actual fix for it is to first populate the slots and name them properly, then simply save them to the startup .mat file that max looks for. Simple and one of those things that really should be in the manual 🙂

Cheers 🙂

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

lwjacob — Fri, 31 May 2019 11:58:58 GMT

Copied the file and voilá. Sir you`re the real MVP. Thank you.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 11:05:49 GMT

copied WHAT FILE??? If you have a solution, perhaps you could SHARE it! 🙂 That's what this place is for,.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

Yuhg — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 11:47:21 GMT

@Anonymous If you read my solution on this very same page, then you will find the information you need.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standar

10DSpace — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:58:26 GMT

Did you try in a newly opened file populating the material editor with standard materials and then saving the file as maxstart.max? Might achieve what you are looking for.

Re: Material Editor always defaulting to 'Physical Material' instead of 'Standard'

7971energie — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 16:39:22 GMT

good afternoon! I don’t know if the topic of the question is relevant to you now, but I encountered the same problem. The solution is this (and it works!) You, according to the correct advice that you were given above, should copy three files from the folder of any 3d m a x version, where By default, standard materials are loaded (I have 2020) along the path C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2020 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\defaults\MAX
then when loading a new program start in the material editor, standard balls)))