From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

Using the Slate Material Editor - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Using the Slate Material Editor

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- [Instructor] Let's take an overview of the 3ds Max material editor. Launch it from its button on the main toolbar. We get the Slate material editor by default. Slate is the node-based interface. Materials and maps in the Graph view are called nodes, because they're usually connected to one another in a network. Slate has an older cousin known as the Compact material editor, and I actually don't recommend that because it's quite limiting. It's not node-based, which makes it difficult to build, visualize, and manage a complex shader tree. But you may need to go into the Compact material editor on rare occasions in order to set some options. It's accessed from the material editor menu under Modes, or from the button on the main toolbar. We can switch over to the Compact material editor by choosing Modes, Compact Material Editor, and that loads up, and we can switch back. By going up to the buttons on the main toolbar, you'll see that the Material Editor button has changed. We can hold that button down, and from the fly out, choose Slate, and we switch our mode back to the Slate material editor. Slate is composed of four windows. The main window includes the title bar, the menu, the material editor toolbar, and this main area, which is composed of one or more tabs called Views. This is the panel where we can build and manipulate our shader graph. The other three panels within Slate are also known as tools. We have the material map browser on the left, and on the right, by default, we have the navigator and the material parameter editor. If we select a node, its parameters are displayed there. The material map browser shows a list of all the materials and maps that we could potentially create. It also includes a list of all the scene materials that are currently applied onto objects. If I scroll down, I can open up Scene Materials, and we see a list of all the materials that are currently in my scene. Additionally, at the very bottom, there is a rollout called Sample Slots, and I can open that up and scroll within the scrolling. This kind of gets a little bit weird here, but there are scroll bars within scroll bars. The sample slots are a kind of sandbox area where we can store materials and maps that will be saved with our current 3ds Max Scene file, but are not necessarily applied onto any object in our 3D world of the viewports. We'll talk more about all of this later. The Navigator window simply shows an overview of where we are in the main graph. We can navigate in the graph using the middle mouse button to pan, or we could zoom with Ctrl+Alt+middle mouse, and as we do that, the navigator updates in order to show where we are within the global graph. Well, I don't tend to use the navigator really ever, so I always hide it. We can manage the user interface in a few different ways. The Tools menu gives us the ability to show or hide those tools. For example, I can turn the navigator off by choosing it from the Tools menu. I can re-enable it using the shortcut, which is n, hot key n, or I can hide and show different user interface elements by right clicking on the Grab bar, and just as in the main user interface, we can show or hide those different panels. One thing I like to do is actually float the material map browser out to its own window. I can right click on that and choose Float, and now it's in a separate window and I can show or hide that with either the button up here, material map browser, or the keyboard shortcut, which is O. I like to do that because there are other ways to create nodes, and hiding that browser window gives me a much less cluttered interface. So there you go. That's the Slate material editor. And now I've got it kind of paired down to just the basics. I'm seeing the View and the parameters for the selected node. That's an overview of the Slate interface.

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