Black Architectural materials in Material Editor

[south bank]

All the architectural materials and promaterials in the material editor are appearing black and I wondered if any of you had a solution.

 

I recently installed and uninstalled Vray Demo in Max 2009 and despite doing a full system clean of Vray including the registry, everything remains black in the material editor. I have turned backlight off, changed the render engine repeatedly between scanline and mentalray and performed a re-install of 3DS Max.

 

It only seems to appear black with new documents, as they do apper correctly in documents in which these materials do/did exist.

Even importing material libraries to new files results in black materials in the preview window.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[ilyass]

did you see if the userpaths are correct if they point to a specific folder which contain the textures, maybe its that idk for sure.

[south bank]

Thanks,

 

The paths were fine with everythink pointing to the correct folder. Unfortunatly the institution I have to work at runs Max 2009 and doesn't have Vray. I'd been having to get by with Arch and Pro materials until I could get some time to commit to mentalray or vray, however the Vray demo ruined mentalray rendering in the material editor.

 

Since my first post, I've tried a completely clean re-install of Max 2009 on my machine, including a registry wipe. After the re-install I ran a vray-less max, re-assigned mentalray as the renderer for everything and it has cured it somehow, even though I was doing nothing different.

 

Thanks for your reply.

[BrianKitts]

the reason your materials was black was because after your vray install the material editor was set to display with vray, but the scene wasn't.

 

Instead of all that reinstalling all you had to do is set the current renderer for the scene and the material editor (on the render settings panel) to both be mental ray.

[south bank]

As you correctly stated the vray option was no longer available, however mentalray was assigned for both, which is what caused the confusion about why everything was black.

 

All the vray right click options remained after the uninstall as well, despite no traces of Vray existing in the system whatsoever, with the plugins also no longer being present in the plugin manager or folders even after several restarts. Obviously I had to click one of the Vray options to find out why it was still there, something swiftly folowed by the "An error has occurred. This application will now close, attempt to save a copy etc." dialogue.

 

All I can summise is that during the uninstall and ensuing clean up something, maybe due to carelessness, went wrong/probably missing that shouldn't have in the Max directories. A clean re-install worked though, suggesting the erroneous file(s) was/were replaced. Baffled doesn't justify it.

 

Thanks for the replies though.