3DS Max 2017 Mac Woe

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys. 

I recently installed max 2017 onto my mac via parallels and bootcamp. However there seems to be some issue. When the program is started in Nitrous Direct 3D the program just crashes before I get to a viewport. When changed to Legacy Direct 3D it runs great but the program doesn't work as it should. Hover highlights do not appear and trying to draw a selection is impossible as it is not visible. Buttons stick and I just do not have any confidence that down the line there is going to be a bigger issue IO am not aware of at the moment. Is there a solution to this or am I going to have to buy a dreaded PC. Please god don't make me buy a PC

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

3ds Max *is* a Windows software... so that being said it's not tested on any Mac hardware.  Chances are that your current graphics card is unsupported.  Which graphics card are you using?  You should have the option to start in DX11 or DX9 mode as well as Opengl and Direct3D.  DX9 might be worth a shot. Otherwise, you'll need to upgrade your graphics card but finding a Mac card that is fully compatible might be difficult, I'm not sure.  

You're going to run into problems no matter what in various small areas on Parallels and likely also (though less) on Boot Camp.  You can check the hardware requirements here and see if there is a card that is close to the Mac version.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  

Best Regards,

[JGallagherP3A]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

...or am I going to have to buy a dreaded PC. Please god don't make me buy a PC

---

There's very little difference in Apple and PC hardware these days, plus you've installed Windows on your machine through parallels/bootcamp. Looks like you've already bought yourself a PC, but spent way more money than you should have for a fraction of the performance. 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

I just wanted to follow up here, any progress on this issue?  Which graphics card do you currently have, please?

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Dear , 

What about the new macbook pro ? how is it and its new Retina & Graphic card for running 3ds Max on installed Windows edition beside the Mac OS ?

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

I can't answer that because as far as I know Autodesk does no testing on Mac hardware for 3ds Max.  It's truly a difficult question to answer.  I can happily try to help if you have issues but I cannot suggest it'll be fine because I truly don't know.  Nick24a's issue might be a good indicator...

@Anonymous, did the driver changes help at all?  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

I've been using 3ds max on a Macbook Pro Mid 2010 (via bootcamp / Windows 7 Pro 64bit) for about 6 1/2 years without any issues.

Now that I've received my new Macbook Pro 2016 (touchbar), which has more RAM and CPU-cores to share, I started playing around with Parallels Desktop 12  / Windows 10 Pro 64bit. Installed 3ds max 2017 -> first start -> did not even see the grid in the viewports(!) When I started to put objects like a simple box into the scene, I couldn't see them either. Some of my 3ds max 2016 files could not even be opened by 3ds max 2017 - it crashed immediately.

Anyway, I've switched the Display Driver from Nitrous Direct3D 9 (Recommended) to Legacy Direct3D, which did not help a lot. I could see the grid and objects in my scenes, but often objects disappeared or turned black and white etc.  - looked like a mess. Still could not open some of my recent files. Besides the viewport seemed very slow. It ran slower than on my old Mid 2010 MBP. Often I had to switch to wireframe only to see all objects and to gain a better performance.

I was about to give up, since there are reports that Parallels Desktop 12 does not support the latest DirectX version, which seems to be the main reason for these issues.

My last attempt was to change the 3ds max Display Driver to Legacy OpenGL. This seems to be a fairly good solution until Parallels Desktop 12 starts supporting DirectX. I can now open ALL my files in 3ds max AND the viewport looks a lot better! I can see smooth surfaces, edges etc. 

Tested a vray-scene with the latest vray-version -> works just fine.

Now I can't wait to try out some GPU-support and therefore hope that Parallels will come out with a new version soon!

Hope I could help a few people out there having the same troubles with this combo.

Have a great day!

[Anonymous]

...can't edit my previous message anymore, but want to add a note concerning the first start without any Display Drivers settings:

Until you switch to any of the legacy drivers you will (most probably) see an error-message during startup that says "FTL: Virtual device creation failed."

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thank you very much for sharing your experience and workaround.  Kudos to you, sir! 

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm attempting to migrate Max 2018 onto a MacBook Pro with Touchbar running Parallels 12 and Windows 10 Pro.

As others have reported, you need to launch Max with the -h option to select a different display driver

Max has 4 display driver options: Nitrous 3D (default, which doesn't work), Nitrous software, legacy Direct3D and legacy OpenGL

Parallels 12 has 3 options for Graphics acceleration: DirectX9, DirectX10 or disabled and you can set an amount of VRAM (recommended 512MB)

The MacBook has a Radeon Pro 450 2GB and Intel HD 530 1.5GB, so there's a lot of graphics hardware available. Currently I'm using Nitrous software with Direct X 9 on Parallels, which works, but has anyone come up with a better combination of settings that they would like to share? 

Thanks

[pixelwash]

Those settings don't work for max 2016 on my Mac Pro running Win 7 64 in boot camp in parallels on a Geforce card using Nvidia drivers, although I'm fairly sure it used to work when I had a Radeon card. Still trying to find a combination which works. Older versions of 3ds max still work fine though (I'm running 2009) on this hardware with a windows virtual machine running xp.....

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @pixelwash,

You might try OpenGL or LegacyD3D and work up from there.  This thread is a bit old but I have since first posting discovered that Autodesk does actually test Max on Bootcamp and Parallels, and it stopped passing certification testing I believe three years ago due to changes in the Mac hardware and driver setups.  That was the point where many features and functions were not working perfectly and this article has since been created.  Since you are on Win7 that does make it a bit easier in terms of conflicts.  I don't have a Mac with Max to test this on where I"m located but if you post your results that would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

[darawork]

Kudos for having it run on a Mac,
I've heard that's some hardcore chit.
Honestly, I wouldn't have a clue.

[pixelwash]

Just an update on getting later versions of 3ds Max (2016, and 2018) to run on my Mac Pro - success! And using Parallels, with the faster hard Nitrous (Direct3d 9) display, with a Nvidia card (and a Radeon) at once in the machine, using multiple monitors.

I tried everything with an older installation of Windows 7 64, which was a boot camp drive, which I also tried to run within Parallels unsuccessfully. I did an "upgrade"  re-install of Windows 7 on it (which took a whole day), and it still didn't work. So I created a whole new system, completely virtually within Parallels, nothing to do with bootcamp, and 3ds max 2016, and 2018 both work fine on it.

I'm yet to get the bootcamp partition to work in Max, after re-installing the system in place, and it still not working (although it worked for one single startup of 3ds max, and then stopped, which was tantalizing). After that didn't work, I re-installed the BootCamp drivers which Apple recommended for my hardware, and that totally hosed the system - BSOD on boot, and nothing I have done so far has been able to get it to get that Windows 7 64 bootcamp system to boot at all again...

At some point, I will re-install Windows in place on it again, and carefully add the Bootcamp drivers one by one, with rollbacks set, and I'll find out which ones are destroying the system, and its ability to run 3ds max. But in the meantime, the only reason I wanted to run max has been solved - to convert some models to Maya.

[pixelwash]

PS I'll also try installing max 2017 on the bootcamp driver free Windows 7 64 Parallels installation too sometime, just to see if it works, although I strongly suspect it will, given the fact that 2016 and 2018 work fine there.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thanks for the update on this @pixelwash, good work!  Boot camp is giving you headaches largely because of the video drivers I'd imagine, that's been my experience.  There were some issues with Parallels last year that they must have worked out and it's nice to know they did.  Thanks again for posting your info!

Best Regards,