Hi, I'm trying to get an object's material ID, but all I can find is info on getting the individual face material ID's (which don't seem to make sense either, if I have only one material in the scene and one object, the MatID's are all different). I can access the properties of the object's material with the following: All I want is it's ID number though. Any ideas?

I'll move this over to the Visual Arts forum, where far more Max people hang out, I expect.

If anyone's interested, it was partially solved by accepting the first face's material ID as the best guess of the whole object's material.



I'd still appreciate a proper solution if anyone has one.

An entire mesh doesn't have a material ID, each face does. We can say an object has a material ID of 13, if every face in the object has a material ID of 13. Otherwise, if it is split up between various groups, the 'object' no longer has a single material ID, does it? So your solution is really the right one.

Unless you mean you want to find what slot in the material editor a material is?

If so (not an elegant solution but it should work), you can get:

objMatName = objects.mat.name

for i in 1 to 24 do ( --remember than meditmaterials can only have 24 materials
if meditmaterials.name == objMatName then print i
)

You can also substitute sceneMaterials for meditmaterials with:
for i in 1 to sceneMaterials.count do (
*as above*

So, if you want to find the material ID for geo, you have the right technique, if you want to find the material editor slot, try what I've stated above.

Quote: Original post by Professor420
So, if you want to find the material ID for geo, you have the right technique

Thanks, and it does make sense.

I simply assumed an object might have a material, since this is the way it is loaded from a .3DS file.