Now you should see a completely white material. To fix this simply go to your render settings and scroll down until you find Assign Renderer and choose mental ray. You may notice that the material hasn't changed appearance in the material editor, that's because you've plugged in a mental ray material.

Scroll down until you find the mental ray materials and choose the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion material. This will show all the available materials. Since you'll be rendering through mental ray, select the drop down menu in the Material Browser and choose Show Incompatible. This will open up the Material Browser.Д«y default the only materials that are visible are the standard materials, which show the materials available to us based off the default render engine in 3ds Max. Go ahead and check the Color box and select the box next to the Self-Illumination color. Now, you could map it to the diffuse color but mapping it to the Self-Illumination ensures it receives no direct illumination. For this you can plug it in to the Self-Illumination color. So select one of the default materials and scroll down to the Basic Parameters. This ambient occlusion is going to be applied as a map to a new material. So go up to Rendering>Material Editor>Compact Material Editor. The first thing you'll need to do is open up the Material Editor in 3ds Max. If you want to learn more about Ambient Occlusion and how it works be sure to check out Understanding Ambient Occlusion.ДЄs with most other 3D applications you can setup an ambient occlusion pass through a shader, so let's walk through that method first as it's probably the easiest of the two. Whatever you decide to use it for, you'll learn step-by-step the different methods for setting up an AO pass in this article. Rendering ambient occlusion is a vital technique to master because it can serve many different purposes. Not only is it great to use in conjunction with other rendering passes but it also looks pretty great by itself and can often be used to represent a model's wireframe. Rendering Ambient Occlusion (AO) is a key component in your final render and is often part of the many rendering passes.

3ds max material editor