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I wish to see a cleaner solution for Maxwell materials in the Slate material editor of 3ds max.

Right now it creates alot of these useless nodes, that contains no information that we can manipulate, that way there is no point for them being there.

I usually never dear to remove them in case they have some connection to the shader. So the slate window fills up fast with all this trash nodes.

Those are not useless nodes, they are the components of the material: layers, BSDFs etc. If you remove them, the material won't work anymore. You don't see UI for them because their controls are consolidated into the UI of the material node, so that you can have a material tree and all the settings in one place. Trying to perform the simplest operations, such as changing the order of the layers, would be very cumbersome using the node editor, especially given how bad the interface is for array connections.

Max doesn't have a data flow system internally, with attributes and types and all that. It has a referencing system which says that a node knows about another node, but it doesn't carry data. The slate editor is a huge hack tacked on top of the referencing system to make it look like a shading network system, but falls short in many respects. It provides a slight workflow improvement for renderers which support shading networks, such as mental ray, but it doesn't do anything for Maxwell, where you can't plug nodes into each other. The only nodes you can plug into the Maxwell material are Maxwell bitmaps. There really isn't much point in using the slate editor in this case, the compact version gives you access to all the features in a better way.

Seems you have a good innsight on the technical aspect of the slate. I dint know that.
Good think i don't delete the nodes then hehe

I am aware that it's little to gain in the slate editor, against the compact one when it comes to maxwell. And maxwell already ahve a awsome shader interface with the layers and all.

The plus with Slate tho, is the amount of shaders you can have. You can organise them easier and create new tabs and keep structure that way. I also use the procedural even tho maxwell don't support them. I apply them to a standard material, display them in viewport, and when they look good I bake them to a bitmap and link it to the maxwell shader.

Animating the shader values is also much easier in the slate editor aswell, as you can assign "controller" nodes to the BSDF.


Was just hoping there was a way to clean it up a little. Like if i delete a layer from the shader. It just unlink the nodes, it doesn't remove the nodes...making it messy if you keep tweaking and changing stuff.

The thing with removed layers is also a Max limitations. I think it removes them eventually when it figures out they're no longer needed, but it may keep them around longer because you're looking at them in the slate editor. We'll see if we can tell it to remove them immediately, but it may not be possible.

When i use the MXED from the slate editor it always creates dublicated layer nodes... to remove these automatically is not possible?

For me the slate editor is useful to organize multi-sub-materials and have a good overview over the materials in a scene. But i normally use the MXED to edit the material.

Slate material editor is hugely useful (even if it is a hack ) Anything you guys can do to improve support with it will be much appreciated by me anyway.

/b