Ok so I received my upgrade to 3ds Max the other day. I opened the container to find 2 different DVD’s on the inside (namely autodesk 3ds Max 2009 & Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009). I installed autodesk 3ds Max 2009. Then I inserted the Design version but it says that everything has already been installed i.e. what is the difference between the two? How can I tell whether Design has been installed or not?

While I am at it I was wondering if anybody can help me with my viewport problem i.e. I posted it in another question in this forum (I would really appreaciate it)

Thanks

You cannot have 2009 and 2009 Design installed on the same machine at the same time. To install Design you must first uninstall 2009 (standard) and vice-versa.. This does not affect the license.

Differences? 2009 has the SDK but no Lighting Analysis. 2009 Design has Lighting Analysis but no SDK.

A brief search of these forums would have found many threads on this subject.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Thank you for your reply. Much appreciated. I suppose when I get more advanced with 3ds Max SDK and Lighting Analysis will make more sense to me (of course I can also read up about it ... heeee).

Sorry to bug you again but can you tell me why my view ports cannot have ActiveShade all at once?

You can only have 1 activeshade window at any one time - regardless of whether it’s a viewport or a floating window. You can con only render from 1 viewpoint at a time so it’s quite understandable that you can’t have multiple windows being rendered from different viewpoits at the same time. There’s obviously a technical reason for it - probably because it would kill the system performance on anything but the most minimal of scenes.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.