Command entry: Material/Map Browser 
Materials group; also the Scene Materials group, library groups, and custom groups
Materials create greater realism in a scene. A material describes how an object reflects or transmits light. You assign materials to individual objects or selection sets; a single scene can contain many different materials. Different materials have different uses.
To get a material, do one of the following:
toolbar, click 
(Get Material). 3ds Max opens the Material/Map Browser. Double-click a material type or drag the material to a sample slot, then close the Browser.
To change a material type in the Compact Material Editor:
3ds Max opens a modal Material/Map Browser. If you were at a material when you clicked Type, the Browser lists only materials (if you were at a map, it lists only maps).
If you choose a compound material, 3ds Max opens a Replace Material dialog. This dialog lets you choose whether to keep or discard the original material.
The Material Editor now displays controls for the new material.
The SuperSampling rollout is used by the Architectural, Raytrace, Standard, and Ink ‘n Paint materials. It lets you choose a supersampling method. Supersampling performs an additional antialiasing pass on the material. This requires more time but can improve image quality. Supersampling is especially helpful when you need to render very smooth specular highlights, subtle bump maps, or high resolutions.
The mental ray Connection rollout is available for all types of materials except the Multi/Sub-Object material and most of the mental ray materials themselves (for which it would be redundant). With this rollout you can add mental ray shading to conventional 3ds Max materials. These effects are visible only when you use the mental ray renderer.
Lets you select a DirectX viewport shader for viewing Direct3D hardware shaders. DirectX shaders require the Direct3D graphics driver, which uses DirectX. With DirectX shading, materials in a viewport more accurately represent how the material will appear in another application, or on other hardware such as a game engine.
3ds Max comes with several materials created specifically for use with the mental ray renderer. These materials are visible in the Material/Map Browser when mental ray or the Quicksilver hardware renderer is the active renderer.
The Map To Material Conversion material converts a MetaSL shader tree into a material you can use in 3ds Max scenes.
This section describes the Standard material and other materials that are not photometric. These materials can be suitable for games and animation, but not for physically accurate lighting models.
This section describes photometric materials that do not use mental ray or the mental ray renderer. These materials interact with light in technically accurate ways.
The materials described in this section specifically support hardware shading (as in hardware-driven viewports or a game engine), and the Render to Texture feature.
The XRef material lets you use in your scene a material applied to an object in another scene file. As with XRef objects, the material resides in a separate source file. You can set the material properties only in the source file. When you change them in the source file and then save it, the material's appearance can change in the master file that contains the XRef.
