How to use the Autodesk Material Library with the ART or Arnold renderer in 3ds Max

Autodesk Support

Oct 8, 2023

Products and versions covered

Issue:

How to use the materials and bitmaps that come with the shared Autodesk Material Library to render with the Autodesk Ray Tracer (ART) or Arnold in 3ds Max.

Causes:

Some materials in the Autodesk Material library (previously based on the discontinued Nvidia mental ray renderer) are not supported natively by the 3ds Max ART or Arnold renderers.
Physical Material or Arnold-specific Shaders are not being applied.
When using ART, some materials appear empty in the Material Editor sample sphere slots, and if applied to objects in the scene, cause them to become invisible.
If using Arnold, some of the materials do not look correct or the bitmaps appear to be missing.
3ds Max Legacy Map support has not been checked as "Enabled" in the Arnold Render Setup > Arnold > System tab.

Solution:

If legacy Autodesk Materials have already been applied in a 3ds Max scene, these first need to be converted to Physical Materials using the 3ds Max Scene Converter. (Note: mental ray-specific materials can be converted only by 3ds Max 2017-2020; later versions of 3ds Max do not include the mental ray DLLs to convert the materials completely.)

The Physical Material type will render in multiple 3ds Max render engines, including Scanline, ART, Arnold, mental ray (3ds Max 2018 and earlier) and 3rd-party renderers such as V-Ray.

Rendering Physical Materials with Arnold

After the conversion process, if the newly-converted Physical Materials do not render properly in Arnold, enable the following option in the Rendering > Render Setup menu:

In the Render Setup dialog (F10) with Arnold as the active render engine, go to Rendering > Render Setup > Arnold > Compatibility Mode.
Make sure the "3ds Max Maps Support" entry is picked.
The materials should now display properly when rendering and within the Viewport.

Autodesk Common Materials in Physical Material Format

To ease in rendering in either ART or Arnold, you can download a copy of the shared Autodesk Material Library, already converted to Physical Materials, in the file attached at the bottom of this page.

Note: some browsers may rename the Physical Materials.mat file into a compressed .zip file, such as "Physical Materials.zip" or "Physical Materials.mat.zip." When unzipping this file, it may show an error saying, "invalid .zip archive."

If this happens, either rename the .zip extension to .mat or delete the additional ".zip" extension, and then load the .mat file into the 3ds Max Material Editor.

User-added image

Test image rendered in Arnold with Physical Materials converted from the shared Autodesk Material Library.

Add Autodesk Common Material bitmaps to the 3ds Max asset paths

The Autodesk Material Library depends on bitmaps installed with a variety of Autodesk products, such as Revit, AutoCAD, 3ds Max and others. These bitmaps are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials\Textures folder.

This folder contains a variety of sub-folders; the bitmap assets are in the folders marked 1, 2 and 3, in the \mats folders inside. Each "number" folder contains identically-named bitmaps; the only differences between them are the image resolution. The "1" folder contains low-resolution bitmaps; "2" contains medium-resolution versions, and "3" contains the highest-resolution images.

To use the Autodesk Physical Materials library properly, add the "3" folder to the 3ds Max User Paths:

In 3ds Max 2020-2023, go to Customize > Configure Project Paths > External Files.
Click the Add button, then browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials\Textures\3\mat and add that folder path.
When finished, click on OK.