A few problems I have with 3ds Max 2012

J-kid

Hey everyone, I'm experiencing problems with 3ds Max 2012, they're very annoying to be honest :poly127:. I've never came across them in previous versions of 3ds Max. The problems I'm experiencing is that the whole grid is white instead of being grey and black, when I select vertices and edges they remain white and the vertices don't even show up as blue when they're unselected, sometimes when I open the program the viewcube shows up as orange and green colours and the part on the viewport where you can change it to front, back, top etc or change it to shaded or realistic doesn't show up, and the XYZ axis marker shows up all white too. I hope it's not just me who's having these problem, I've googled it and had no success with it. This problem is seriously annoying especially when I'm trying to select edge loops I can't really see what's going on. Does anybody know how to fix these issues

Here are a few pictures of the problems I am having.

Grid problem


Vertex selected


Vertex unselected


Viewcube


XYZ axis marker


Edge selected




I hope this problem is fixed it's really annoying

Mark Dygert

Looks to me like you have some video driver issues. What kind of video card do you have and when was the last time you updated the video drivers? That's where I would start... You can also try switching max to run in a different mode. I think 2012 defaults to Nitrous which might not be the best option for your particular card. You should try changing it to another mode by going to:
Main Menu > Customize > Preferences > Viewports Tab > Choose/Configure driver.

J-kid

How do I check what video card I have and I really don't remember the last time I updated them. I also tried changing the driver to OpenGL and Direct3D and came across these weird things.

OpenGL


Direct3D

SpeCter

Not sure why his ribbon bar has these huge buttons(?) but mine looks like this:


I like it better then 2010 to be honest

Mark Dygert

@ perna hahahaha, yep.

Start > Run > Type dxdiag and hit ok. Click the display tap and it should tell you what video card you have.

Hopefully it has more than 256mb of ram and is a Nvidia Geforce 300 or better. You can run it on slower cards but you won't get real time normal maps to display in the viewport. God help you if you're using something from ATI...

SpeCter

Mark Dygert wrote: »

@ perna hahahaha, yep.

Start > Run > Type dxdiag and hit ok. Click the display tap and it should tell you what video card you have.

Hopefully it has more than 256mb of ram and is a Nvidia Geforce 300 or better. You can run it on slower cards but you won't get real time normal maps to display in the viewport. God help you if you're using something from ATI...

God seems to like me, i got an ATI card with no problems at 3dsmax at all:poly142:

J-kid

Mark Dygert wrote: »

@ perna hahahaha, yep.

Start > Run > Type dxdiag and hit ok. Click the display tap and it should tell you what video card you have.

Hopefully it has more than 256mb of ram and is a Nvidia Geforce 300 or better. You can run it on slower cards but you won't get real time normal maps to display in the viewport. God help you if you're using something from ATI...

Here's an image of the display tab since I seriously don't understand it.

J-kid

SpeCter wrote: »

Not sure why his ribbon bar has these huge buttons(?) but mine looks like this:


I like it better then 2010 to be honest

I'm not sure why mine is like that either it's kind of annoying because when I click on one of the big tabs to get to something then I try to open another one but the other tab overlaps it my 3ds Max sounds pretty fucked up or it's probably just my computer

SpeCter

I guess getting a dedicated gpu would do the trick.Onboard chips are not good for anything except office work and surfing.

Mark Dygert

Yep SpeCter is right, its the video card.

I take it you're using it on a laptop?
They are notorious for having horrifically slow and under powered graphic chips. Even the ultra high end gaming laptops are underpowered compared to their desktop counterparts.

One of the core problems with that particular chip is that it doesn't have much physical memory dedicated to it, it borrows memory from rest of your system. So say you bought a laptop with 4gb of ram, off the top your video card is taking 300-ish of that to use for Graphics Processing. Then the OS is probably eating up 2gb so you're left with not much of anything to run apps. What's worse the video chip might be forced to give up some ram as the system need increases, its a messy tightrope that they've never really figured out how to walk.

Decent video cards have always come with their own physical memory on the card and don't share resources with the rest of the system.


The overall problem your running into is that you don't meet the min spec for max. Be thankful it starts...

maze

perna wrote: »

Sorry for the off-topic post, but holy crap, is that how 3ds max looks now???

hahaha...

SpeCter

I just found out that it looks like that(big fat button) because of small resolutions.If it´s to small it begins to do that xD

J-kid

Mark Dygert wrote: »

Yep SpeCter is right, its the video card.

I take it you're using it on a laptop?
They are notorious for having horrifically slow and under powered graphic chips. Even the ultra high end gaming laptops are underpowered compared to their desktop counterparts.

One of the core problems with that particular chip is that it doesn't have much physical memory dedicated to it, it borrows memory from rest of your system. So say you bought a laptop with 4gb of ram, off the top your video card is taking 300-ish of that to use for Graphics Processing. Then the OS is probably eating up 2gb so you're left with not much of anything to run apps. What's worse the video chip might be forced to give up some ram as the system need increases, its a messy tightrope that they've never really figured out how to walk.

Decent video cards have always come with their own physical memory on the card and don't share resources with the rest of the system.


The overall problem your running into is that you don't meet the min spec for max. Be thankful it starts...

Oh god... I take it I should get a new desktop then

keres

Mark Dygert wrote: »

@ perna hahahaha, yep.

Start > Run > Type dxdiag and hit ok. Click the display tap and it should tell you what video card you have.

Hopefully it has more than 256mb of ram and is a Nvidia Geforce 300 or better. You can run it on slower cards but you won't get real time normal maps to display in the viewport. God help you if you're using something from ATI...

Geforce 300? Are you kidding? I'm running a 9800GT and it still works great. The size of the scenes you guys must be working with must be unfathomable.

SpeCter

Eventhough the 300er Series is newer than your gpu i highly doubt that it´s faster.Your Gpu beats the crap out of it except that it doesn´t have DX11 support(The 300er Series have that as a feature but don´t have the "musclepower" to really lift any of it´s features)

Edit: I have to correct myself, the 300er Series don´t have DX11 support just 10/10.1 .But the statement about "musclepower" is still the same.

Mark Dygert

I probably didn't word that as well as I should of. Min spec is any DX9 compatible card with 256mb of ram or greater. Nitrous has higher requirements for some of its advanced features like realtime lighting and display of normal maps in the viewport.


For general animation and rendering (typically fewer than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):

• Intel® Pentium® 4 1.4 GHz or equivalent AMD® processor with SSE2 technology*
• 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• 2 GB swap space (4 GB recommended)**
• 3 GB free hard drive space
• Direct3D® 10 technology, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB or higher recommended)

Nitrous is their new viewport display driver that is GPU accelerated. If you aren't using nitrous then its probably as fast as it has always been.

If you're under 100,000 polys then just about any old card will zip around in a standard viewport just fine, provided its not an integrated pile like the OP... no offense but 5+ years of doing Unreal/UT PC support drove me to hate them.

If you run Nitrous it will be as fast as your GPU will allow. The cut off for Nitrous is a Geforce 300, anything lower than that won't have the necessary features to display normal maps in the viewport, even if it has the power...

J-kid

Mark Dygert wrote: »

I probably didn't word that as well as I should of. Min spec is any DX9 compatible card with 256mb of ram or greater. Nitrous has higher requirements for some of its advanced features like realtime lighting and display of normal maps in the viewport.


For general animation and rendering (typically fewer than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):

• Intel® Pentium® 4 1.4 GHz or equivalent AMD® processor with SSE2 technology*
• 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• 2 GB swap space (4 GB recommended)**
• 3 GB free hard drive space
• Direct3D® 10 technology, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB or higher recommended)

Nitrous is their new viewport display driver that is GPU accelerated. If you aren't using nitrous then its probably as fast as it has always been.

If you're under 100,000 polys then just about any old card will zip around in a standard viewport just fine, provided its not an integrated pile like the OP... no offense but 5+ years of doing Unreal/UT PC support drove me to hate them.

If you run Nitrous it will be as fast as your GPU will allow. The cut off for Nitrous is a Geforce 300, anything lower than that won't have the necessary features to display normal maps in the viewport, even if it has the power...

Oh...that's bad thanks for telling me Mark.
So what desktop computer would you guys suggest me getting what doesn't cost too much.

Mark Dygert

I don't recommend parts or systems for people. I recently put a list together of parts I would buy if I was building a new system. The guy used it as a shopping list and tried to piece it together by himself. It was the first time they had built a system and didn't understand what that "grease" on the CPU was... long story short CPU's overheat without thermal paste, who knew, right!?

The kicker is he waited until he was outside of the return period before he put it together and now is stuck trying to pass off his mistake as a manufacture defect. Lucky for him I suggested parts from a manufacture that is very gracious about these kinds of fuck ups, but yea its all my fault so I don't do that any more.

SpeCter

Don´t take the blame you just stated which parts you would suggest not that he should put it together with no experience.
And reading manuals would help big time, every CPU/Fan has one which states how to use the thermal paste(and that you have to use it).

Ace-Angel

Holy flaming Polygon on a Nurbs Mark, don't bloody blame yourself for someone else's mistake. That person could have very well, looked for a premade store and asked the guys to assemble the PC for him, hell they do that for Laptops.

Honestly, why are you being harsh on yourself for just posting up a list as a guide to people to get an IDEA on what they should get within a certain budget? As Spec said, the Manuals exist for a reason, as well the interwebz...

Spark

Just got Max 2012 installed, and having issues where I see vertices behind a poly which is annoying as hell. I did switch out of the nirtrous renderer but actually then couldnt see any vertices at all. Not really having fun with this new version though they did seem to fix a few things. Uodated my vid drivers (gtx 280 card) along with doind the 2012 service pack 1 install. Any help is always appreciated.

Spark