While the material settings should stay in tact, any textures need to be linked to the location.
There is only 1 workaround but its messy for a 'workflow'. That is wherever the textures are, if the max file is in the same directory it will find those textures. Here is an example:
.mat
.png (texture)
.max
They are all in the same folder, so if you have 'stripped' texture paths then it will look directly in the same folder as the max file if the texture is there it will load, otherwise it needs to know the location in the Asset Tracking window.
FYI It can also look down tree for textures, if thats any useful information for you. that means you can have subdirectories below the 3dsmax file and it will look there too, example: