I have been using Max 2009 (design) for a little to create a scene with a number of meshes and textures in it and have run into an unexpected and niggly bug which I have been unable to resolve despite searching both the net and my options extensively. Basically, in scenes with more then 1 normal map* they do not display correctly in the viewport.

* method is bump @ 100, map - normal bump - submap in normal slot is bitmap - image is TGA or PSD

On file load some, about 25% of the, normal maps display the wrong TGA. In order to fix the issue you have to create a new material and new maps and re-apply it. In my case often dragging it into a group material. However this method will often result in a new random TGA already in the scene being displayed instead.

IF you repeatedly replace the material with the same cloned material, the TGA’s it cycles through are limited (eg. it doesn’t randomly pick all TGA’s in a scene).

The curious thing about this issue is that upon render the correct TGA’s appear but back in the viewport they remain incorrect. I suspect that the directX shaders are getting confused by having multiple TGA’s and I confirmed this by noting that if you repeat the above step but use a name of a material that already has a normal map it will use that material most of the time.

My specs are:

Vista - 64bit
MAX 2009 - 64bit
Shader - DirectX 9
GFX - Nvidia 8600gt 512mb
RAM - 4gb DDR2
CPU - AMD 4400+ dual core

I have also noticed, since I started doing the diffuse maps (which I link to material editor as PSD’s) that the direct 3d shader has I guess a memory leak. Of course, direct3d does not natively support PSD’s so perhaps its just having issues converting them but over time my FPS drops in the viewport and when I ctrl+alt+del I find MAX using over 3.5gb of RAM for a scene with under 10k tris and a handful of mixed 256x256 to 512x1024 maps, perhaps 20 at most.

Could there be some major issues with direct3d / max in Vista as all my problems are viewport related.

Oh, and when I ctrl+alt+del and come back to max it says direct3d failed to initialise and I have to restart max to redraw the view.

I’ve since found that the quickest way to ‘solve’ this issue, while still time consuming, is to clone the actual map (diffuse or normal) that is not displaying correctly into another material editor slot and the to clone it back on top of itself. This results in another random map appearing. If you repeat enough times you’ll usually get the map you’re after. Also, I’ve noticed the problem is less extreme now that I’ve reduced the amount of normal maps and the memory issue isn’t as big a problem now that I’ve merged my file into a new one that has no PSD’s in it. At one point a PSD added another 300mb of RAM despite being only 512x512 and at most 4mb.