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Once the material has been applied to the scene, the sample sphere occupied in the Materials
Editor can be cleared and prepped for another material and it's
that procedure that get you around the limitations of having only 24 sample slots in the editor.
But in the situation where a material has been removed from the editor, what would happen
if you've decided that you want to go back and change that material?
I'm sure it can be done, but how? Well, that's what this video is designed to
demonstrate. Let's take a look.
This is a file named Materials. You can find it in the Chapter 1 folder in
the exercise files. It's really just a continuation from the file
that we used in the previous video. Now, let's first clear up the materials in
the editor that have been applied with the scene.
So, we'll open it up and why don't we just take the gray sample balls in the bottom and
drag them up right on top. Now, you'll notice in the shaded Perspective
view, we still have the orange material color on the teapot.
This verifies the fact that even though the materials have been removed
from the editor, they are still applied in the scene.
But now what's the trick to getting them back into the editor?
You see the only place in Max where a material can be adjusted is the Material Editor.
So let's see what we can do to get it back in.
Now, you actually have a couple of different choices to retrieve a material and again,
the choice you use all depends on how clearer the shot you have at being able to select
the object in the scene. In the case of the teapot, it'd be very easy
to simply use the eyedropper that you find at the left before you named the material.
With the icon activated, if you put your mouse inside the viewport, notice that when it's
away from the teapot the white part of the eyedropper
appears to be empty. But now watch what happens when you take your
cursor and put it directly on the teapot. See how the end fills up and after doing so,
let's go ahead and simply click and you've now got the orange material back
in the editor, with the triangles around the corner indicating that it is indeed the one
applied to the scene. Now, the story is a little bit different though
with the sphere. You can certainly try the eye-dropper, and
maybe 50/50 chance of getting the sphere or getting the teapot material,
but let me show you a little bit more of an accurate way of going about this.
We'll first need to select the sphere in the viewport.
So, let's go ahead and click on that. Now, let's go on the icons below the sample
balls and choose the one to the far left; it's called Get Material.
Now, if you look in the upper left-hand corner of the browser that opens up,
you've got several different options now as areas in which you can browse from to get
your material. Now, if you look in the list, I think the
one that makes the most sense is let's just simply browse from the scene.
What is displayed now on the right-hand side of the browser are the two materials that
you've worked into your project. This also is the first opportunity I've had
to identify, you see the little blue spheres you see next to the as
yet to be property name the materials, those blue spheres tell us
that these are materials that we're seeing inside the browser.
If you look to the far right of the material name, you'll see the actual object that it's
been applied to. So in this particular instance, we've already
got the teapot material. Let's instead double click on the material
called 02 Default, which has been applied to the sphere.
That loads it back into the editor and that puts us back in business as far as being able
to now change these materials. So go ahead and close the browser up.
And why don't we now change the orange teapot to, let's say, yellow?
So I'll activate that sample ball. Do I see any colors of yellow inside those
top three ramps? I do. Look at the green.
I'll simply take the green and add more in and that'll give us our pure yellow color.
Let's go ahead and say OK to that. So we can see the changes that we're going
to be making to the sphere. The sphere is currently selected, let's activate
the Perspective view, we'll grab the blue handle on the gizmo
and we'll simply move that up so we can now see what we are doing.
Why don't we change the green color to, let's say, a light blue?
So again, I'll click on the Diffuse color swatch.
I'll look for the light blue colors within the top three ramps.
Here's an easy one. I'll simply take the blue and start adding
that further into the right. You see how easy is this to read the ramps
once you get a better idea of what they represent and we go ahead and
say OK to that. So all depending on what works best for your
situation, you now have a couple of options as far
as retrieving material out of your scene. Now, in our next video, we're going to crack
this thing up a couple of notches and get started
about making materials a little more complex, you're definitely going to have some fun with
that. Let's get right to it.