Material Editor lost in the void - Max

Prs-Phil

Hi guys, I have a bit of weird problem at the moment.

Normally I work on 2 screens, but now on holiday, I only have one screen wich, due to leaving in a rush, left me with the problem that my Max UI was floating around on the righthand side. No real problem, resetted the layout, and I had everything again ... except my material editor.

Now borrowing a second monitor quickly isn't the issue, but finding an adaptor to hook up to the gfx card in the valley I am in right now, at this time, is.

So I was thinking if you guys could help me out with some info on how to get that window out of the void onto my only screen.

Thx

Slum

Have you gone to your display properties in Windows and disabled the second monitor? If you don't do that, most programs and Windows will think there is still a monitor attached.

That *should* force all windows onto the only monitor, regardless of where they were in the 2 monitor setup.

thomasp

try looking through the 3dsmax.ini (and possibly other config files in max root dir). somewhere in one of those it surely saves the window positions.

MoP

If you use a program like Ultramon for your dual monitor setup, you should have an option to set a hotkey to "move window to other monitor" ... then you could just hit that key after opening the material editor (since it will be in focus as soon as you load it) and the window will pop to the correct screen.

Prs-Phil

thx, for your help guys, found the [MtlEditorPosition] in the ini with the coordinates, works fine.

gr8, thanks again

pior

Funnilly enough I had something very similar two days ago - I temporarily switched from dual to single screen, material editor displayed fine but as soon as I clicked a material slot it was instant crash. I could drag and drop textures to the slots, but couldnt fetch them manually.

Reason was, the material type window (with the green losanges list) was out of screnspace. Plugging back my secondary monitor fixed this. Crazy!

arshlevon

i have had similar problems in the past, i always just delete the ini file now, a new one is made on startup and everything is back to normal.

Rhinokey

ok heres a quick fix for this problem ,and it also fixes lost photoshop windows,
1.in max press m to pop up the material editor,
2. press alt+ space and release
3.click the down arrow once and click enter
4. click any arrow key once
5. move mouse towards your monitor ! yay your material editor should be attached to the cursor

only takes 2 seconds!