Max 2024 material editor shortcuts stop working

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

The shortcuts inside the material editor stops working on a regular basis. I need to close the material editor and open it again for it to work. Is this a common bug?

[RobH2]

Can you be a little more specific? Which material editor, Slate or Standard, and what exactly are you calling shortcuts? It will help others understand what to look for.  

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

The new slate material editor in max 2024. Specifically shortcut for  applying materials to selected objects (A), delete a material (del), the button to turn off/on show map/texture ( the button to show texture doesn't work at all - it doesn't even have a tooltip when I hover it). that's mostly the shortcuts I use and they seem to stop working after a while.  

[RobH2]

Thanks for that. I'll try them out and see what I get. 

[RobH2]

Do you use V-Ray?

[RobH2]

I ask because V-Ray the past year or so, causes lots of funkiness in Slate if an IPR is running. It didn't use to but it has since Max 2023 and V-Ray 6. I used to be able to have really fluid interactions in Slate while IPR was running. Now it's really slow and I have to start and stop it often to get things working again. If you do have V-Ray, and you have been noticing the shortcut problems while and IPR render is running, try stopping that render and see if the shortcuts behave now. 

And if this is the case, I'd  suggest you head over to Chaos Group's forum and report it. I'd like to figure out why the IPR is not so fun anymore with Slate. 

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

Hi sorry didn't get a notification on this message. I'm using Corona renderer. 

[RobH2]

Same question, does the problem happen more when an IPR render is running? 

[Mr.Mxyzptlk]

Just taking a guess but could it be this? Seen a lot of people having similar issues.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2021/ENU/?guid=GUID-C14C1D13-0E8E-4471-9671-077FDFB156C8

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

Hmm, I need to investigate that, it could be. I did do Interactive rendering while noticing this. 

Btw, are you also experiencing the white brackets on materials used in the scene and selected gone when you load max and re-open a scene? This is even more problematic in my opinion and it happens for me both in scanline and corona. 

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

No sorry it’s not. It stops working after a while, and then I close the material editor and open it and it starts working again.

[RobH2]

I'm not a programmer but I'm guessing that's a really good hint on a symptom. That it stops working and has to be reloaded to hook the shortcuts again. I'm wondering if that might not be a OS issue and not even related to Max. Again, I'm not a programmer but when functionality just disappears, I'd think that would be diagnosable. Like, a thread just stops or terminates or something. This is as interesting as it is frustrating I'm sure. I wish I knew more about the code but it's above my pay grade. 

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

If it is Max or Corona I do not know. I don't think it is the OS, because this was never an issue before the new Slate Material editor in max 2024, so it has to be possible to fix it within max or the renderer. 

[RobH2]

I'm finding Max 2024 particularly crashy and buggy. It's good that you discovered this issue. Be sure to report it as a 'Bug' to the proper place. You can search the forum to find out where. 

I keep looking every day for the first Patch to come out. Max is generally not usable for production work until that first patch is made available. I am never really able to relay on a new Max realease until about 3-4 months after it comes out. It takes that long sometimes for the 3rd parites to have recompiles ready as well. 

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

I agree, max 2024 has a few bugs. Im surprised how much obvious bugs are in the new slate material, like the "show textures on material" button not working at all (all ready affirmed by autodesk to be a bug), and the materials not having white brackets in the material editor for materials active in the scene. Clearly such obvious bugs should have been noticed during development, they have been working on this for years, and I noticed this after 30 mins of usage.... 😞

[joachimbarrumX79N5]

I'm unable to find a place where bugs should be reported though. I thought this was the only place and you can only hope Autodesk fix it within the next decade. (that was not meant as a sarcastic remark actually)

[ads_delesdr]

@joachimbarrumX79N5 Thanks for flagging your issues here. Unfortunately, there were a few problems that went out with the new SME in 2024 that were either caught too late or we thought we/our users could live with in order to get the new functionality out. The keyboard shortcuts are particularly affected by the other QT elements in Max, so they tend to fight over priority with other UI components, especially other 3rd party plugins. We'll have things cleaned up soon (and the missing hot material brackets are noted too)!

[RobH2]

@ads_delesdr  

Thanks for weighing in on this.

I do have a question, "is there" an official place to report 'bugs?' Like the OP, I was unable to search and find where to submit them. There used to be if I recall but it was never well publicised. 

[ads_delesdr]

The link in the Help menu (Feedback>Report a Problem...) still works for reporting issues to the team, but it was reformatted recently to be more generic for all products instead of focused on the M&E ones and not just for defects, so there aren't as many fields asking for specific information. 

https://www.autodesk.com/company/contact-us/product-feedback 

[ads_delesdr]

@joachimbarrumX79N5 Maybe I should have waited an hour, but now I can say that we've officially released 3ds Max 2024.1 Update! It should resolve many and hopefully all of the issues with the new SME that you posted about. If you continue to see issues with shortcuts or anything else, you can "report" them here or use the link I posted above to get a more official defect report to the team.

What's New in 2024.1: https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-6D9D2414-2FCB-4F32-8764-AA439269FBA6

What's Fixed (it doesn't list the SME issues, but they should be addressed in the release): https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2024/ENU/?guid=3dsMax_ReleaseNotes_3dsmax_2024_1_releasenotes_...