I almost have finished a set of utilities for the Material Editor. I know… I know, everybody has his own script for reset the material editor, but I couldn’t resist…

There will be more than that, you will be able to get the materials from the scene, no only the first 24 materials (a limitation that after 7 Max versions I still cannot understand!!) but materials sorted by pages (each page would contain 24 materials).

Another option will be to get the material from the selected objects, as well as the new Expand Multimaterial, that will extract each subMaterial to the Material Editor from the Multimaterial selected.

All of this integrated into the Material Editor menu, inside the utilities menu. You can always assign the options to keys, or include them as buttons into toolbars.

Im thinking even to create something like object selection sets, but for the material editor, each selection set would include a set of specified materials that you could easily drop into the material editor.