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● Gmax Installation and Configuration Troubleshooting ●

With over 350,000 registered Gmax users out there, you can be sure that there have been some common problems popping up during the installation of the software. This page has some of them, and the solutions for them. As always, be sure to visit and search the gmaxsupport.com forums for the very latest help. Everything one this page has come directly from the forums.

"Interactive 3D Rendered Initialization failed. Please check your device settings by using the -H command line option"

"Unable to create a Hardware Accelerated Direct3D device with the necessary requirements. Using the Direct3D software Reference Rasteriser"

"Gmax opens but there is nothing in my view ports!"

This is a video card issue, and it's easy to fix. First, make sure you have up to date opengl and directx drivers installed for your videocard. Then, nake sure you are running your card at either 16 or 32 bit color depth ( not 24!).  If gmax opens but your viewports are blank, just go to Customize>Preferences>Viewports. Press the button in the lower left hand corner of the window that says "choose driver". Typically this is a Direct3D issue, so change it to OpenGL or Heidi and restart gmax. If gmax won't start at all, try this: Right click on your gmax shortcut and choose properties. Now find the target dialog and at the end of that line put -h thats (space)-h and click the apply button. Now when you fire up gmax you'll have the chance to pick another driver.

"mtlgen.dlt is missing"

This error usually means the paths contained in <gmaxroot>\ plugin.ini are different than the installed location of gmax. Either you can fix the paths in plugin.ini or simply delete plugin.ini and gmax will recreate a new one.

"Macromedia Flash 5 required / is missing "

Use the 1.1 gmax installer to reinstall flash 5. This is inconvenient because you have to use the outdated version of flash to use the material editor. This is really the only option because you can't get flash 5 off macromedia.com without doing to installation manually . So  if you upgrade to flash 6 the material editor won't work. Discreet is aware of this problem and is working to fix it.

"I start Gmax and then it freezes the whole computer and I'm unable to recover. I have to reboot to get things going again."

I've found the problem on my PC, by trial-and-error shutting down of background applications I have found that the offending problem is my Gravis USB Gamepad - which uses Gravis Xperience application GRXP4EXE.EXE. If you have this running on your PC, shut this task down. Since this application is using part of DirectX, I guess this could interfere with GMAX - and I can live with disabling my Gamepad as I don't need it for GMAX. If this doesn't fix your problem, then there may be other applications that cause the same problem - shut down any tasks under your username (except explorer) and then try GMAX.

● Gmax Tips and Pointers ●

... just some helpful tidbits to make your gmax experience more successful...

History... If you right click on either the undo or redo buttons, a window will open that is very similar to the history panels in Photoshop or PSP. You can use these to jump back and forth in each step of your modeling, in case you make a mistake along the way but don't catch it right off.

The F3 Key .... If you press it while modeling, it will flip your active viewport between shaded and wireframed modes.  Handy when you're working on complex models. ..