I am no expert in this area. I have never had time to get into how to create my own materials and this would slow everything down quite a bit I suppose.
I can't get any of the Autodesk MaterialLibarary to work with Arnold, while these used to render well with mental ray.
It was so easy for me to have a lot of premade materials to make my scenes look nice without having to know too much about materials.
I think you realize that I am not a very skilled 3ds max user, and now I don't know how to get my scenes to look good with the Arnold renderer.
I also spent a lot of money on getting a GeForce gtx 1080 Ti FE graphics card to speed up my rendering, but now I find that only the CPU can be used to render.
I know there are renderers out there that would make use of my cuda cores but as a student the price is a bit steep....
Sorry for changing the subject... it's just been a bit frustrating.