It's very aggravating when you can't find something on the user interface, especially when you saw it a few minutes ago and now it's gone missing. Of course, you're so engrossed in your modeling that you forget what you may have done that caused the button, element or dialog to disappear.
This section addresses several of the most common user interface situations and how you can fix them.
Material Editor Defaults to Architectural Materials
Multiple or Missing Buttons on the Toolbars
While some users like to configure their systems to use large fonts, this setting is not recommended with 3ds Max. The 3ds Max user interface was designed to operate with your system set to small fonts. Small fonts are the default setting for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
If you have your system set to use large fonts, some of the most common anomalies you can expect while running 3ds Max are as follows:
To remedy these problems, set your system font back to small fonts.
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Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel, and click Display.
You can also right-click anywhere in the open desktop and choose Properties.
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In the Display group, click the arrow to open the Font Size list and choose:
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Click Close to exit the Display Properties dialog.
You will most likely have to reboot the system for these changes to take effect.
3ds Max has many dialogs or windows that float when you open them. This feature allows you to drag them anywhere on your desktop. You can greatly improve your design efficiency by positioning dialogs out of the way of the main 3ds Max interface, such as on a second monitor if you have dual-monitor functionality.
However, there are times when a dialog gets lost. Either you drag it someplace and inadvertently let go of it, or some data is written incorrectly to an initialization file and you end up with a lost dialog.
There are a couple of ways to recover a lost dialog; both entail working with the 3dsmax.ini, found in the \Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 9\ folder.
Thorough Method
In this example, let's say you've got a single monitor that's configured for 1280x1024 resolution and you've lost your Rendering Progress dialog.
It was visible the last time you rendered, but that was awhile ago and someone else has been using the system.
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Make sure 3ds Max is not running.
The 3dsmax.ini file is constantly being updated while 3ds Max is running.
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Scroll down the list of entries until you find the data block:
[RenderProgressDialogPosition] Dimension=-425 152 379 866
A dialog's position is based off the location of the upper-left corner, anchored by the first pair of digits. Therefore, in this example, the upper-left corner of the dialog is -425 pixels from the left edge of the screen and 152 pixels from the top. The second pair of digits describe the horizontal and vertical size of the dialog, so this dialog is 379 pixels wide and 866 pixels tall.
Since this example assumes a single monitor, configured for 1280x1024 resolution, this dialog is off-screen to the left. If the first number were greater than 1280, the dialog would be off-screen to the right.
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Place your cursor on the “Dimension” line and scroll over to the problem number.
The problem number is usually the first or second, since the last two set the width and height of the dialog.
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Change the problem number to a value that is positive and within 1280x1024.
The next time you render, the Rendering Progress dialog appears appear on-screen.
This is the preferred method, because it causes no loss to other custom configuration settings that are stored in the 3dsmax.ini file.
You need to be careful when using this method, because you don't necessarily know what custom settings are saved in the 3dsmax.ini file. Perhaps you have 3ds Max set to display the command panel on the left and you've changed the viewport background color. Furthermore, if you have third-party plug-ins installed, they sometimes write information to the 3dsmax.ini file. If you delete the file, you will losing all those settings.
If you're not sure about customized settings that are stored in the 3dsmax.ini file, you can rename the file to something like old3ds.ini. When you restart 3ds Max, you can continue working and, at a later time, compare the two files and copy the data you need from the old one to the new one.
When you open the Material Editor, you encounter Architectural Materials instead of original Autodesk VIZ Standard materials.
Autodesk VIZ now allows you to set default user interfaces. If you build architectural models or require photorealistic rendering, you can set the user interface to default to features more relevant to the way you work. This is a new feature that is set from the Customize menu > Custom UI and Defaults Switcher dialog
This setting gets saved to the 3dsmax.ini file and you have to restart 3ds Max after using the Defaults Switcher.
The command panel normally appears along the right side on the user interface. If you start 3ds Max and notice that the command panel is missing, there are usually three causes.
All of these situations can be quickly fixed by using the following steps.
Whenever you move, rotate or scale an object, the standard, red axis tripod is replaced by a special purpose transform gizmo. It's quite easy to lose the transform gizmo, but it's also easy to get it back. If you find you've lost your transform gizmo, try these steps.
This is another tricky situation. You open a toolbar and find that there are duplicate buttons present or the button you expect to find is no longer there.
Note: This problem is caused by holding the Ctrl key and dragging a button on the toolbar.
This is clearly a user-interface problem, so reverting to the startup layout will fix this problem.
If you have multiple buttons and don't want to reset the entire UI, you can manually remove duplicate buttons by doing the following:
If buttons are missing, you must use Revert To Startup Layout.