topic Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor in 3ds Max Forum

3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 22:26:32 GMT

I'm having a very weird issue with the latest version of Vray for Max 2017. If I have an object selected, and I open the Vray material editor, the material that is applied to whatever object I have selected disappears from the editor. Meaning it just turns into flat grey v-ray material, and all my settings are gone. If I hit Ctrl+Z the material will reappear, but it's extremely frustrating and annoying to deal with. If I open the Vray material editor with no objects selected, a random material will disappear from the editor. I have to hit Ctrl+Z every time I open the editor and it's an extra step I shouldn't have to take.

What's worse, occasionally materials will disappear from the scene itself. So I'll be working, and if I have multiple materials applied to different objects in a group, the entire group of objects will turn grey and I lose all of my materials. Crtrl+Z does not help in this case. When this happens, I have to hope that I saved the file recently before this happened and reopen it.

Has anyone else had this happen to them? Is it some weird bug? Does this bug have a fix? Any info is appreciated, thanks!

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

rendermaster — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 05:20:22 GMT

did you already assigned vray as your default render engine.

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:25:02 GMT

Hi, thank you forr responding. Yes, the renderer is set to V-Ray. Only one material disappears at a time, and it doesn't go to black like when you switch from the V-Ray renderer to scanline, I just lose all of my material properties and it reverts to a flat grey V-Ray material.

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Mon, 15 May 2017 21:13:55 GMT

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

This is really strange, no doubt about it. I have three main suggestions here.

1) Try resetting your user settings. Perhaps they are corrupted somehow.

2) Download Vray and reinstall, perhaps this was a problem that has been addressed.

3) Possibly your Windows User Account is corrupted. This is probably not it, but you can test by making a new user in Windows and trying again.

Can you please try those things for me? Thanks!

Best Regards,

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Tue, 16 May 2017 22:00:19 GMT

Hello @Anonymous,

I just wanted to follow up here, any thoughts on my previous post or the helpful post by @rendermaster?

Best Regards,

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 07:21:39 GMT

Hello everybody...

Hi Simons
I've got just the same problem that you have. it turns grey and I think also loses the assigned relation to the objects. I'm new to max And 3ds max has this problem with V-ray Material editor... when I switch the material editor to MtlRay (default) it works fine ... looks sth is wrong with the V-ray. I'm using 3ds max 2017 and V-ray 3.40.03 installed on windows 10.
Many thanks

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 04:58:30 GMT

Hi Alfred,

I am also having this problem as well. Has anyone found a solution?

Thanks!

Ana

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

rendermaster — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:41:03 GMT

just check if your render engine is in vray, if not your material editor will turn into grey..set first your render engine to vray

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Alfred.DeFlaminis — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 18:05:51 GMT

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

As @rendermaster noted, if Vray isn't the current renderer it will render those vray materials as a flat gray color with no shading. You might check to make sure that Vray is the current material editor renderer. If it is and the problem persists, you should contact Chaosgroup as Vray is a 3rd party plugin.

Best Regards,

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 09:10:17 GMT

Hi,
I found a solution for my issue and it's simple and weird.
it might solve your problem too
I tried all the solutions that our friends here recommended them such as setting default render engine, etc.
But accidentally I realized that opening the v-ray material editor using it's "dedicated toolbar icon" creates this malfunction.
I prevented this issue by simply just opening the material editor via pressing "M" shortcut key on the keyboard.

Apparently this is a UI mistake/error.
I hope this trick works for you too...

Best regards

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 18:34:38 GMT

Thank you so much!! That ended up fixing the issue! 🙂

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 19:36:59 GMT

Wow...that is so simple, and it DOES fix the issue. Thank you so much for sharing, very much appreciated!!!!

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 19:38:38 GMT

WHAT! HOW!

Bloody weird but this worked.

I can't thank you enough.

Re: 3DS Max 2017 Vray - materials turn grey when I open material editor

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 23:26:43 GMT

Hey all, this is WAY late in the game...only 4 years later, for some reason I never received notifications for this post and randomly got a notification two days ago even though the last reply was in 2018...weird! Anyway, I never did get to try any fixes, just eventually moved onto later versions of software and the issue sorted itself out. I'm willing to bet the "M" key was short for "Magic" though based on others' comments 😄 Thanks for the responses and I'm so sorry I didn't get to capitalize on the great suggestions here!