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Hi there!

When I open 3dsmax 2011 scenes in 3dsmax 2012 (both 64bit), all maxwell materials are shown black in the viewport. Material preview in the material editor as well as rendering is fine. Newly created materials are displayed properly shaded. Only materials that were imported from 2011 are displayed black, no matter what viewport display settings I choose. What's going on here? Any help will be appreciated...

Did you use a Nitrous driver for the viewport?
How about apply a mirror twice.
I think it's a Nitrous bug. It has several problem as I know.

The problem does indeed only occur with the new Nitrous driver. When I switch back to DirectX, all is fine. But I don't think that this necessarily means that the fault lies with Nitrous. It seems to be perfectly able to shade Maxwell materiels as long as they were created within 3dsmax 2012. Only materials imported from 2011 seem to be affected. Does nobody else experience this problem?

We documented this in the release notes, check the Plug-in updates sticky thread.

Hi Mihnea,

thanks for the information. But these release notes do not seem to explain the specific behavior I observe. Here's what I do:

1. In 3dsmax 2011, I create a default maxwell material (no changes to material parameters) and assign it to an object. The object appears gray and properly shaded. I save the scene.
2. I then open this scene in 3dsmax 2012. The object appears completely black in the viewport. Material editor preview as well as rendering work fine.
3. Still in 3dsmax 2012, I create a new maxwell default material (exactly as I did before). I assign this new material to the object, which then appears correctly shaded in the viewport.

So it seems, although these two materials have identical properties, Nitrous somehow sees them as being different.

It will appear shaded correctly (sort of) until you assign a texture. If you assign a texture, it will continue to display a solid color.

We'll check why materials coming from 2011 are black even when they are not textured, we weren't aware of this issue. Thanks for reporting it. Anyway, the Maxwell material simply isn't compatible to Nitrous at the moment. We are working on that, we'll give you more details once we know exactly where we stand (it's not a trivial thing to implement).

It happened to me also, but not only with scene with maxwell but vray scenes also display materials in black.
No idea what's going on in there.

Is there an update tothe progress? I'm evaluating Max2012 at the moment and was experiencing the same appearance. With Nitrous I have a very fast display and dont want to use DX9.

With DX9 I always have visual glitches if I enable hardware render in max2010 and other strange stuff like vanishing proxies.