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

[Anonymous]

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!

[rendermaster]

did you already assigned vray as your default render engine.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

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,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

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

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

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 

[Anonymous]

Hi Alfred,

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

Thanks!

Ana 

[rendermaster]

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

[Alfred.DeFlaminis · Accepted solution]

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,

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

WHAT! HOW! 

Bloody weird but this worked.

I can't thank you enough.

[Anonymous]

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!