3DS Max 2016 Alpha Aliasing

[livanc]

Hi,

I just installed 3DS Max 2016 and opened a tree mesh I'd been working on in 2014. There is a lot of aliasing and blurriness in the needles texture. I know it's a 2016 issue as it looks fine in 2014. I have set the maximum viewport texture size to 2048 and enabled antialiasing in the material editor options. However, my display driver option only shows DX9 in 2016, whereas in 2014 it's set to DX11 - could this be part of it? Any ideas about what's going on?

Attached are relevant screenshots, the second-last one being the tree looking fine in 3DS Max 2014 and the last showing the material settings in 3DSM 2016. And as an aside, what is the blue line around my selection and how do I get rid of it?

Thank you!

[eodeo]

What GPU do you have? Did you get the latest drivers for it?

[livanc]

I've got an old Nvidia 9500GT and yes, its drivers are up to date.

[eodeo]

9500gt is borderline DX10 3d accelerator. It couldn't have supported DX11 in any version of Max, as it does not support it, as it is DX10 class GPU. MY old 4850 displayed DX10 in 2014, as it too is DX10 card.

Last DX10 card came out 6 years ago in 2009. Maybe Autodesk finally dropped DX10 support. Just speculation on my part.

You can get used dx11 card for 50$ that will be at least 2x faster than 9500gt. You can see in what class any GPU is:

www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

2 tiers above is about 2x faster GPU. You want nvidia 4xx or newer or AMD 5xxx or newer to get dx11 support. Aim for x6xx card as it denominates that it is a mid range GPU. Something like gtx 460 (nvidia) or r7 260 (amd) would be excellent, but you may need to pay closer to 75$ for these.

Be aware that you may need better power supply to get these. The rest of your computer is most likely compatible. Only if it is a very small case or a miniature form factor will you have any other issues. If you check what power supply you have, I'd be happy to tell you the strongest GPU you can get for it.

[eodeo]

You may want to revert from nitrous and go with either direct or openGL. They may do better with your specific need here. It's free and easy to check.

[livanc]

Thanks for the responses! I did try changing the viewport driver to Legacy OpenGL and Direct3D and while it helped the aliasing, the textures were still super blurry and unrecognisable.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 518 desktop. I can't remember exactly but a Google search tells me that it has a 300W PSU.

[MagicRen]

Transparency behavior is a little different in 2016. I can't see your picture but I assume it's the alpha test/Alpha to coverage issue.

Please try to set opacity to non-100 if you're 100 now. Or set it to 100, if it's not 100.

The behavior in 2016 is for Opacity = 100, the opacity texture is treated as "Cut-off" texture while non-100 is "Transparency" texture.

[livanc]

Brilliant, that worked! Thank you very much, both of you, for the help. I appreciate that.

One last thing though, how do I get rid of the yellow/blue glowing box that appears when mouseover/select?

[Steve_Curley]

Customise > Preferences > Viewports tab > Selection Preview Highlights (turn that off).

[livanc]

Thank you, Steve.

[MagicRen]

Alt+J by default