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When using multiple machines to render an animation or still image, it’s important that every computer has access to every texture in the scene. Unfortunately when working on a project there are usually always a few textures that can only be found on the computer you have been using. Texture paths can also be broken when working on a scene using a different computer.

There is however a brilliant tool built right into 3ds max to change multiple texture paths at the same time, and get them all pointing to the correct folder. It’s a very good idea to always check for any texture path related issues before sending the job off to render.

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Navigate to the Utilities tab in 3ds Max (the hammer) and click on ‘More…’

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A window will pop up showing a load of other utilities build into 3ds Max. Click on ‘Bitmap/Photometric Paths’ and press OK.

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A couple of buttons will appear in the utilities tab under the name ‘Path Editor’.

If you have textures in your material library that arn’t in the material editor make sure you tick ‘Include Material Library’.

Click on ‘Edit Resources…’

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A window will open displaying every texture in your scene.

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Press the ‘Select Missing Files’ button. All textures that have missing paths will be highlighted.

Press the ‘…’ button to the right of New Path and choose the folder where all the textures can be located.

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Click on ‘Set Path’ and you will see that all the highlighted textures now have the new path. If you are preparing your scene for network rendering, it’s a good idea to select all texture paths and make sure they all point to a network shared texture folder.

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Click on ‘Select Missing Files’ again and hopefully nothing will be highlighted. This means that every texture can be found and the paths have been set correctly.

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Thank you for reading this, and I hope you will find it useful. Tim.