Material ID control on export

[didrik_lepisto]

As a long time Maya user I am still to this day surprised that Maya lacks just a simple way of controlling the index on materials when exporting as FBX. A program so broad and with endless possibilities, but this one little thing just doesn't seem to exist.

Let's say I have 3 materials. Chrome, Brushed Metal and Plastic, and they need to be in a list of following:

1. Chrome

2. Brushed Metal

3. Plastic

This is really important when creating functional assets with LODs because every LOD needs to have identical ID's.

Upon LOD creation, there's a lot of detach/attaching, splitting, separating and combining etc from the original model which in the end changes the face index.

Apparently the face index from 0 is what decides the index of the materials, so if Chrome ends up on face 0, this will be the first indexed material aswell. Controlling this and getting it right is so utterly complicated, I basically need to find the first face and detach and sew together parts in order and make sure that order ends up correct and it is really tidy and annoying. For each time that I start cutting and recombining, the order can change all around, so if I have many different materials it really will not work at all. It's not optimal.

I have not used Max, but in Max it seems like this is as simple as it should be, a basic list and assign ID.

How come Maya still not have anything like this? Tons of artists choose Maya for game related modeling, and not being able to control something as crucial as this is shocking. It piles up many unecessary work hours. I can't seem to find anything in any editor window throughout Maya. Is it something very simple that I'm missing?

I've searched endlessly for threads around this issue, but I've yet to this day found a work-around thats optimal.