3DS Max Modeling/Texture Workflow Problem
Hey guys, I am in need of some advice as I've hit a wall that requires tons of (i hope unnecessary) work to overcome in my model-making to world-editor workflow.
Right now, this's what I am doing-
1) Make model (say, a small building) in 3DS Max, apply textures, apply texture mapping, and export to .dae (opencollada)
2) Drag .dae into model editor, where it auto-generates the various .mtrl and .gfx files in the same directory where the .dae was dropped from.
Here is the start of the problem - all of the .gfx's and .mtrl's are linked to the .mesh by file path, and this is not easily changed. My buildings are on average about 10-40 'parts' as defined by the model editor. If I move these generated .gfx's and .mtrl's files into another directory, the .mesh shows up w/o textures, as I assume they are not finding the necessary files within its own directory.
To use 'common' textures at this point, ones I intend to use for many different models, saving disk space, texture memory, etc, I have to manually update each 'part' within the model editor with the correct .mtrl/.gfx filepaths. Otherwise, I can move the entire model (.mesh, all .gfx and .mtrl's) into their own folder just fine - but in the process I am wasting tons of valuable memory to redundancy when I have copies of the same 20 textures in a hundred different folders.
Re-Applying the textures in the model editor from the 'common' texture folder for a few models is easy, but at this stage in my project I literally have 100+ models with 'parts' in the range of 10-40 per model, expecting another 100+, and its extremely painstaking manually applying each texture in the model editor to each 'part'. On the models with more parts, this process can take longer than actually making the model in 3DS Max in the first place.
I have to do this -
1) Separate the .mesh's into their own file structure, and make sure that any newly integrated textures have their .gfx's and .mtrl's in the common directories (brick, stone, ground, etc)
2) In Model Editor, Cycle to first 'part', and in material editor navigate to the correct .mtrl file, and apply.
3) Rinse/repeat.
Keep in mind I have to keep 3DS Max open during this process (thankfully I have two monitors) and constantly switch back and forth to the data browser to find the correct type of brick (and its filename/location) I want to apply to this particular 'part'.
All of this wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm using upwards of 30 different textures on some of the bigger buildings.
Am I just approaching this like an idiot and there's a simple, easy way to do this? I hope so, and I hope you guys can tell me how to do it. I have to go to work for the next 9 hours or so, so I can't immediately answer any additional questions till then - I'm not ignoring the responses.
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