Materials in 3ds Max are vital to making your visualizations compelling and realistic. The native material attributes that 3ds Max relies on are those that tell it how to render the surface of an object given certain lighting conditions. Those material properties that are so central to architectural visualization (that convey surface coloring, surface texture, transparency, and so forth) are only one of many sets of properties covered in an AutoCAD Architecture (formerly Architectural Desktop or ADT) material definition.
To make your work more efficient, the rendering material properties stored and assigned in AutoCAD Architecture are designed to flow transparently to 3ds Max through the File Link Manager.
Material assignments exhibit special behavior on linked AutoCAD Architecture objects and blocks, and the behavior is controlled by the Propagate Materials To Instances.
AutoCAD Architecture (formerly Architectural Desktop) object components frequently appear in 3ds Max carrying rendering material assignments that were made in AutoCAD Architecture. You can use these materials, adjust them, or replace them with new rendering materials for use in 3ds Max.
An important consideration in how many materials render is how they are “mapped” to the surfaces of the objects they are assigned to. This is especially important for materials that use bitmaps to define the diffuse color of a material, or the bump and cutout special effects.
