Max 2012 weird viewport shading

hamzaaa · Jul 2011

Hello folks,

I recently downloaded Max 2012 student license and I got a weird problem. Sorry I am a newb and I don't know how to get around (yet) ^^
In my viewport I get weird shading when I am using meshsmooth. I think my geometry is okay, but the smoothings is weird anyways... Maybe you can help me out!

I attached my geometry with meshsmooth on and the mesh without meshsmooth (yes it's the cube from andrei313's normalmap tutorial ^^)

1%20(1).jpg

**Edit:

Some more weird stuff 2012 brings up.. I can't see my 0-1 box..

Thanks!

Mark Dygert · Jul 2011

Probably a video driver issue. What kind of video card do you have and when was the last time you updated the video drivers?

In 2012 they upgraded the viewport display driver and it defaults to "Nitrous" which older cards and non-workstation cards seem to have trouble with.

If updated the video drivers doesn't solve the issue or you have some semi-questionable hardware you can try reverting back to the old standard display driver.

Customize > Preferences > Viewports Tab > Choose Driver

hamzaaa · Jul 2011

Well I don't doubt that my hardware is semi-questionable because I am currently working on my notebook

It has a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. I will try out the drivers update and I hope it will work ^^

Silix · Jul 2011

hamzaaa wrote: »

Well I don't doubt that my hardware is semi-questionable because I am currently working on my notebook

It has a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. I will try out the drivers update and I hope it will work ^^

i run max 2012 32-bit with nitrous fine on my laptop and i have a hp dv6885se, has a nvidia 8400m gs, i even turn on hardware rendering and blast the AO and shadow settings sometimes for funsies to check out my model.

-update drivers
-update max to sp1

i did have troubles with max before i installed the hotfix, then i installed service pack and it's all working swimmingly now

aivanov · Jul 2011

2012 has this wonderful bug with certain video cards where the default shading is screwed up. Happens with mine (a GeForce GTX 480), even with the hotfix/SP1 installed; thus I'm still on 2011.

Does the shading on your default primitives look okay? (No strong backlight/fresnel effect for no reason?)

You can try to go to your Configure Viewports (Click the + in the Perspective view) and change lighting and shadows to 1 light instead of 2 lights. See if that helps.

EDIT: These posts describe what I'm talking about:

Post #1
Post #2

[HP] · Jul 2011

Nitrous is awesome, i love it especially for highpoly modeling.

Anyway, I had the same "problem", nitrous just renders things differently to what we were used to; to fix that just change lighting and shadows to 1 light instead of 2 lights, like mentioned above.

hamzaaa · Jul 2011

@silix: okay nice to hear that notebook users are able to use 3dsMax

Updating my video card drivers had no effect. Still weird shading. Where can I get the hotfix/service pack?

@aivanov, [HP]: Thank you! I will try that out!

**Edit:

okay so I turned on only 1 viewport light and it seemed to have fixed the strange shading and my 0-1 box is back, but there is still pretty weird stuff going on. Look at my cube after I unwrapped it. Something is definitely wrong here :>

**Edit2:

So I installed max2012 Hotfix1, Servicepack1 and Hotfix2. Seems to have fixed stuff. I will bump this tread if anything more weird stuff happens to me. Thanks guys for helping out a newbie like me

cheers

Max 2012 weird viewport shading

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