This probably won't be helpful but I thought I'd reply anyway so you know you're not alone! (I am very ignorant about molecular stuff but know 3D animation).
I also have been looking into this tool for creating molecular models in MAX (I have some clients that want molecular 3D animations and it would be great to be able to use MAX to do this!). First some background. My main workstation is XPx64 and I run MAX2010 through MAX2014. MAX2014 is my main pipeline 3D app. These apps are installed at the root level of the system... not down inside Programs, etc.
I carefully installed Python 2.66 and all the other stuff (somewhat convoluted instructions/process). And got it to the point of ePMV and Autopack are installed in the MAX2013_64 interface and I can bring up the dialogs for each. I also updated each to the latest software version.
When I used ePMV to fetch the default molecule... it worked just fine and a 3D model of the molecule appeared in the MAX viewports and I could orbit and use MAX as normal to interacte with the 3D object.
Later, I used ePMV to fetch a different molecule and it worked just fine as well.
These basic tests are all I did.
Then today, I wanted to try it again and see if I could collapse the fetched molecule to a standard mesh or epoly object (to verify use of the created model within standard MAX usage) but when I tried to fetch the default molecule again... I get the same error messages as you did.
I briefly tried using the AutoPack dialog to create the default HIV model and it took a bit but worked fine and there was a huge HIV model in MAX2013_64. This AutoPack app seems less crashy but I don't have a clue what I'm doing or how to use it. (I would also like to understand it's use better for packing volumes... not just for molecular applications but for example packing objects in a cardboard box, etc.).
So my guess is it seems that perhaps this tool is not ready for primetime yet. With deadlines looming, I don't have a lot of time to experiment with this... I need it to work reliably if it is to be of any use to me.
Good luck!!
Hi Mcquarrie,
We were just alerted to your message here on the Area. The error message you are receiving is typically a python path issue. We have not yet encountered the Python 2.8 message, but would like to work with you to fix this. It will probably be easiest to setup a teamviewer session. Can you please contact me directly at info@autopack.org, or move this conversation onto the autopack forum where we get email notificaitons of all postings related to autopack issues. http://www.autopack.org/support/forum
Thanks and sorry for the trouble,
Graham