Michael J. Brown

SOLUTION: It was a Stereoscopic object that got added into the scene. Some combination of keys I pressed obviously created it. I deleted it, and voila! Problem fixed.

SO, I've been working on this scene and running renders from it all day with no issues. That is until just now when I noticed a 'split-screen' happening in my render window. I must have hit a bad combination of keys somewhere along the way that triggered this. I've never encountered this before. (light cache pre-render attached) I've combed through my Render Setup and found nothing out of the ordinary. Does anyone know how I can disable it?

Thanks, Fransisco! It was a toss-up between this avatar of Theo Huxtable and one from the famous Gordon Gartrelle episode. ? My whole family used to gather around the TV and watch The Cosby Show every Thursday. I kind of figured as much (with regard to how different softwares utilize various hardware components). My computer does need a good 'Spring Cleaning', so I'll make that the first thing I do.

I don't know how many of you all are 'car guys' (I am), but there's an engine technology that's been around for years now (some of you may own vehicles with it and not even know it). It deactivates one or more cylinders in an engine when there's no need for them. i.e., Cruising down the highway at 70mph an 8-cylinder engine will automatically deactivate say 5 of those cylinders. But when you want to pass somebody and you step on the gas, it wakes those 5 cylinders back up. I was just thinking it would be nice to have something similar for workstations. The thing pumps out so much heat that I've attached an aluminum dryer vent flex tube to the main exhaust port to channel the heat out a window. Without that, the temp in my home office can eventually reach 5-10 degrees hotter than the rest of the home. And I fully expect that while rendering or in active shade mode. But outside of those scenarios I don't see why my graphics card and CPU need to be operating on all 8 cylinders and kicking out all that excessive heat. It'd be nice for them to have some sort of 'cylinder deactivation'.

There's a mysterious window that opens up (and remains open) anytime I'm running 3dsMax 2020 - (Windows 10). I don't know if it started happening due to me installing 3dsMax 2020 or not, but it most certainly never did prior. It doesn't seem to hinder any functionality in Max. It has no name. Clicking on the multi-colored squares in the upper left corner only reveal a standard drop-down menu of "Restore, Move, Size, Minimum, Maximum, and Close". It can be closed easily enough without affecting anything. But it just bugs me that this mystery window keeps opening up right alongside Max. It's more of an annoyance than anything else. Has anyone else experienced this?

Do any of you (archviz freelancers in the United States) carry liability insurance?

So I finally made the switch to Windows 10 yesterday. Fortunately (through some strange loophole), I was still able to take advantage of the free upgrade from Windows 7 originally offered back in 2015, instead of having to fork over $140 for it. Anyway, I knew something was wrong when Autodesk went asking me to sign in to my account as I started Max 2020 up for the first time since getting the new OS. And sure enough, all my personalized settings had completely disappeared:mad: I could understand this happening if I had upgraded from one version of Max to another. But an operating system change should not have forced a complete reset of my software back to factory defaults, should it? Is this what everyone else experienced after making the switch to Windows 10?

Thanks much, Josef. That did the trick!

2011 Design

I've lost the label display on two of my viewports over the past several weeks (probably from inadvertently hitting the wrong shortcut keys), and can't seem to find how to get them back. Can anyone provide some assistance?

I finally found what to adjust to get my Material Editor sample slot windows to reappear. Somehow several of them had been moved too far off screen to be retrieved by any means I could find online (including the Windows Key + Shift + Arrow Keys method). Went into the 3dsmax.ini file and removed all the negative values from the "MagWindow..." entries.

Just getting into the new features in Vray 3.3 One of which are the (helpful) tooltips available throughout the Render Setup dialog (floating mouse over a function). Problem is many of those tips take longer to read than the 4 or 5 seconds they remain visible. Instead of re-floating my mouse over a command multiple times until I've made it through the whole 13 paragraphs on what each Image sampler setting is good for, or what each Light Cache mode does, I'd like to have it just stay put until I move my mouse off of it. Does anyone know how to increase the default duration of those tooltips?

thnks, Scott.

Okay, so I finally upgraded from Vray 1.5 to 3.3 last weekend and noticed that whenever I use the RT function, every window on my system (both inside and out of 3dsMax) experiences tremendous lag. Panning, scrolling, everything lags. I've tried switching between CPU, OpenCL and CUDA on the RT interface, with no discernible change in performance. I'm running a single GTX 980ti card, which I know is more than capable of handling RT functions on a host of render engines. As a comparison, at work I'm running RT on Vray 2.4 with only a lowly Quadro 2200 card, and I get NO LAG AT ALL. I just don't get it. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks all! I really appreciate your input. What a great bunch of guys we have here