You would now have to start using multi/sub object materials.
They allow unlimited number of materials within a single material.

1) Open a regular material ball.
2) Click the button 'Standard'
3) Then choose Multi/Sub-Object

This will automatically give you 10 more materials on that material ball, but before it does it will ask you do you want to maintain the current material. If you have used all the materials which it sounds like you have, you MUST choose the option, 'keep old materials as sub object'

~C

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]

thanx dear,

but i get material from get material icon, then multi sub object material has been disapear,

i mean, when i load multi sub object material, 10 slots of materials (ball) comes, when i get material like vray material or some others then multi material slots disapeared.

sorry....

what to do?

regards

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dear,

now i tried to get material from standard button now i can get again those slots.

from the name bar, i got it....!

thanx again my dear if there ll be any problem ill appear again...

Regards

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Heh, no problem!!!
~C

Mod: How do we mark this as solved?!

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]

Using multi sub object material is great but I'm just curious, how many material slots do you have? Default material browser holds 12 slots. If you go to material browser Options you can increase the amount of slots to 24. This seems basic, but I didn't know this for a long time. Just thought I'd check before marking Solved.

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Chris

Howdie!
Yup, 24 slots is the total Material Slots available.
You can however with multi/sub objects have hundreds of materials. I had to faithfully re-create 25 city blocks of a city for a game we made, and I only used 3 material slots, but had roughly 160 materials in each slot as a sub object!
~C

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]

...................................why?
Your eyedropper will make your balls be any mat/color you want. Even blue. Use just one mat ball for the rest of your life, IT DOESN'T MATTER...

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What?! Even blue?! That doesn't make any sense, LOL!!!
In theory with the multi/sub object you can use only one material ball for the rest of your life!!

One major advantage of using Multi/Sub Object materials is if you're working in a large team of people and need to share a material library... as soon as one of you changes that library it can easily be exported and re-imported into another users max file!!

~C

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]

Right and some game engines require the multi/sub object material, but i think sanwal isn't there yet. In fact i've read a lot of his posts and have no idea what he does with max. You really don't think there might be a team of sanwals out there, do you? I say keep it simple with this guy. I mean next you're going to have to explain the concept of mat ids to him, when he still has trouble writing, "dear friends," (or whatever) at the start of all his posts.

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So long as the materials are applied to objects in the scene you can just clear the material editor and get them back by using the eyedropper or get from selected etc..
I usually clear the editor with the clear slots utility every so often just to speed up performance.

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You have a good point there!!!

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]