The Material Assistant is a new and easy to use material editor which uses a set of intuitive parameters to greatly simplify and speed up the material creation process. In Max, the Material Assistant is a material node that can be created from MEdit.

The Preview button instructs the material preview renderer to refresh the material swatch.

The Change to Layered Material button will create an equivalent Maxwell Layered Material and replace all the instances of this material with the new one.

Currently, the Material Assistant node can create the following material types:

AGS: special transparent material useful for speeding up interior renders - see the Architectural Glass Solution (AGS) page for details.
Car paint: for creating multilayered paints such as metallic car paint.
Metal: all kinds of metals.
Opaque: any kind of opaque, diffuse or shiny materials such as solid plastics, shiny wooden floors, concrete etc.
Translucent: all transparent and semi-transparent materials which are translucent - plastics, marble, milk. This one does not look very easy at first, but it actually simplifies the creation of translucent objects. Learn more in Translucent assistant page.
Transparent: all transparent glass and plastic materials which are not translucent (they do not have subsurface scattering).
Hair: useful for hair, fur.
Xrite AxF Material: This allows to load handle an Xrite AxF material. Check the X-Rite AxF Material page for more information.
TableBrdf: It allows loading a material from the MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories) BRDF database, also called TableBrdf materials. Please, check the MERL Material (TableBRDF) page for more information.

In order to learn more about the assistants, you can check this page: Material Assistants

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