03-19-2009, 02:30 AM
Here's something I wish I learned a looong time ago.
If you have a mesh with many materials - which you should have since it's a good idea to attach everything and weld the vertices before exporting - it's extremely easy to select the polygons for respective material. You only want one material per strip, anything else is unoptimized. The exception is if you want special behavior, like having part of a material being doublesided. It's easy to get duplicated materials if for instance you bring in model parts from different max scenes.
Select the mesh. Unroll the Editable Mesh modifier and choose the Polygon sub-object. In the modifiers rollout, scroll down near the bottom and unroll the Surface Properties section. Under the rectangle entitled Material you'll see a drop-down list. Select one to select all the polygons of a particular material.
There's another way to do it, which is to use the dipper in the material editor to import the composite map -- but if you have a mesh with a lot of duplicated materials, selecting the polygons like I mentioned has proved a far superior method to me personally.
If you have a mesh with many materials - which you should have since it's a good idea to attach everything and weld the vertices before exporting - it's extremely easy to select the polygons for respective material. You only want one material per strip, anything else is unoptimized. The exception is if you want special behavior, like having part of a material being doublesided. It's easy to get duplicated materials if for instance you bring in model parts from different max scenes.
Select the mesh. Unroll the Editable Mesh modifier and choose the Polygon sub-object. In the modifiers rollout, scroll down near the bottom and unroll the Surface Properties section. Under the rectangle entitled Material you'll see a drop-down list. Select one to select all the polygons of a particular material.
There's another way to do it, which is to use the dipper in the material editor to import the composite map -- but if you have a mesh with a lot of duplicated materials, selecting the polygons like I mentioned has proved a far superior method to me personally.