BAT4Max v.5

[Ceafus 88 1,794]

I still have 3ds Max Design 2014, but I was hoping to jump up another few years because I love the way 2017 feels. Thank you for the information @MushyMushy

[CT14 2,486]

After months of garbled exports, all my BATting effort is now spent trying to locate a legit copy of 3ds Max 2012 Student edition.

Either that or back to the old school, Gmax.

[rsc204 21,808]

On ‎13‎/‎09‎/‎2016 at 4:03 PM, CT14 said:

3ds Max 2012 Student edition

There is no such thing and there never has been. All copies of 3DS Max are identical, it's the licence that's for "students", that allows you to have it free. But one of the conditions of this licence is that it must be continually renewed, which will necessitate upgrading to a newer version every few years. You will never find a legitimate version of 3DS Max you can use free, that is older than a couple of years.

Even if you are willing to pay for the software, in which case you'll need a proper licence, there are problems. If you pay Autodesk, then you won't have access to any editions not covered by the Student Licence anyway. So that leaves you digging around the second-hand market, a market Autodesk has done all it can to ensure doesn't exist. Occasionally if you are lucky, someone may sell their old licence. But due to the rarity of such things, you will need some luck to find one and the cost is still going to sting. So long as your computer continues to work with it though, at least then you have a stable version you don't need to upgrade.

[CT14 2,486]

@rsc204 That's good to know. I'll probably start my next model in Gmax for those reasons.

[AndisArt 2,066]

I'm having some serious glitching that prevents me from continuing to work on this project:

It's like the geometry gets distrorted or deformed but it's only a visual glitch. It affects the whole scene. It's worse when rotating. When zooming out it disappears. I did not change anything with the system drivers or driver settings before it happened. I tried with other drivers inside Max without success.

Any ideas?

[rsc204 21,808]

Maybe try switching the renderer in use. Switching to software rendering may help you out. Bear in mind here, the actual rendering only utilises your CPU anyhow, so it shouldn't affect render times. It only relates to how the workspace is processed.

Otherwise, you need to look towards your videocard's drivers. If you are using Windows 10, without your knowledge it may have updated the drivers for you, the same if you have automatic updates for older versions.

[AndisArt 2,066]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Maybe try switching the renderer in use. Switching to software rendering may help you out. Bear in mind here, the actual rendering only utilises your CPU anyhow, so it shouldn't affect render times. It only relates to how the workspace is processed.

Otherwise, you need to look towards your videocard's drivers. If you are using Windows 10, without your knowledge it may have updated the drivers for you, the same if you have automatic updates for older versions.

 

Thx for your reply. I tried reinstalling Max (I use 2011 for BATing), no change. Then system restore on Windows 10 to about a week ago, clean reinstall grafic card driver and clean install Max, no change. I'm afraid, the file is somehow corrupted. When I merge the scene in a new file (save selected + merge) it works without the glitches so far, however, I have some really weird things happening with the scale. The scale of everything changes after a while and the values are either becoming gigantic or tiny. Happens everytime again when I try new. It's like when I click on preview, the whole scene is suddenly tiny in front of me, whereas before it filled the screen in Zoom5. And I didnt rescale or anything and I didnt touch the Sytems Unit options either, so I have no f*n clue what the heck is going on there. There are models I imported into the scene from other sources. Maybe sth happened there. I spend the whole day trying to solve this... hope someone else knows more.

[rsc204 21,808]

Since I'm also using 2011, I could test the file for you? If you want me to do this, upload it somewhere and pass me a link (PM is fine). Please ensure you include all necessary resources for me to open it, I'd recommend utilising the "resource collector" feature in Utilities (BAT) / More to do this.

[Heblem 600]

Is there's any issue with 3dsmax 2016 and BAT4Max?, I can't seem to export, all I get is "Export failed! Code = 6", even exporting simple objects like a box with proper LODs I get the error, any solution to this? I really want to export "tons" of stuff to SC4 but i'm stuck in this error, it worked fine in 2013 version, but can't get back to it, only for 2016.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

13 hours ago, Heblem said:

Is there's any issue with 3dsmax 2016 and BAT4Max?, I can't seem to export, all I get is "Export failed! Code = 6", even exporting simple objects like a box with proper LODs I get the error, any solution to this? I really want to export "tons" of stuff to SC4 but i'm stuck in this error, it worked fine in 2013 version, but can't get back to it, only for 2016.

I don't know about people using 3dsmax 2016 for BATting, so I don't know if it's not compatible. As far as I know this Code 6 can mean many errors, but the most common is it appears when you don't open the software as an administrator, did you do this way?

[Heblem 600]

19 hours ago, JP Schriefer said:

I don't know about people using 3dsmax 2016 for BATting, so I don't know if it's not compatible. As far as I know this Code 6 can mean many errors, but the most common is it appears when you don't open the software as an administrator, did you do this way?

Launching the software as an administrator doesn't work, still getting same code 6 error. The only solution now it's to look for an older version of 3dsmax for allow me to work on my projects into SC4, hoping it will allow me to export.

[rsc204 21,808]

2015 was certainly working, but 2014 is possibly a better bet for compatibility reasons.

If you have a student licence edition, you should be entitled to download/use the last few revisions of 3DS Max.

[Heblem 600]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

2015 was certainly working, but 2014 is possibly a better bet for compatibility reasons.

If you have a student licence edition, you should be entitled to download/use the last few revisions of 3DS Max.

Got it working using 3dsmax 2013 version without any problems, like fresh and new!
Seems like 2016 versions on forwards (probably 2017) will not work for BAT4Max anymore. 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

I've heard of problematic issues in 2015 and total unusability in the 2016 version onward. The problem lies with how old the BAT4Max script is and doesn't seem to work with the newer versions. Somehow, the script will need to be updated.

I'm running 3dsmax 2014 relatively smoothly (few slight problems that are easy to work around because the solutions have been mostly figured out), and got a new 3-year student license because I know they'll likely remove 2014 from availability soon. Frankly I'd highly suggest doing that for people who are using the free non-commercial licenses to make their BATs.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

26 minutes ago, Heblem said:

Got it working using 3dsmax 2013 version without any problems, like fresh and new!
Seems like 2016 versions on forwards (probably 2017) will not work for BAT4Max anymore. 

Where did you get the 2013 version? D:

[Heblem 600]

1 minute ago, JP Schriefer said:

Where did you get the 2013 version? D:

I had it since 2012, problem was when I upgraded to 2016 last year and I got all the issues with BAT4Max.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Oh ok.

I'm already thinking about what to do after 2014 version be unavailable

[MushyMushy 3,617]

1 hour ago, JP Schriefer said:

Oh ok.

I'm already thinking about what to do after 2014 version be unavailable

At least since 2014 is still available one can technically get a new license now and bet set for the next 3 years. Hopefully a solution will be worked out during this time. We can only hope. 

[art128 4,618]

Hello Simtropolis people,

I need your help today.  I wanted to get back into bating a little bit and thus installed 3dsmax 2010 (and 2009 and 2012 to test), with BAT4MAX v5.

But I'm afraid something must have gone wrong, because every time I try to do a preview render, the closest zoom (5) (and the other four too) is way too far,  even after deleting and reset the LODs it didn't help at all. (The units is set correctly, 1, 16 and whatever for the third, it doesn't matter) For instance, for a 16x16x16 cube with automatic LODs (so same dimension as cube) I get a preview window that's as tall as a 300m skyscraper preview.

 

I tried 3dsmax 2009 and got the same issue, same for 2012. I haven't tried newer but I'd like not to.

Anyone has an idea on how to resolve this annoying issue?

 

Btw, if this is more suited in the 3dsmax trouble shooting and general discussion thread, then a moderator can feel free to move the post.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Go to Customize>Units Setup, and then in the window that pops up, go to System Unit Setup, and make sure that 1 unit = 1 meter. 

After you confirm that, try again. There are system units, and then there are display units. So for example for my Guardian Building BAT, the system units are set to meters, but the display units are set to feet and inches so that I can model american dimensions more easily. I can change the display units back and forth without any problems but if I change the system units then things start getting messed up. 

If that doesn't work, then try starting a completely new scene with the system units set up correctly. Another thing that can happen is that if the units aren't set up right then when BAT4Max tries to set up the render window it messes up and you get a preview render that is scaled normally but has tons and tons of empty space above the BAT. This sounds like your problem. But yeah I think that has to do with units too, the system units being wrong causing the BAT4Max stuff to not work quite right. 

tbh I've had the problem before too, and even though I know it has to do with units I don't remember exactly what, so whenever that happens I open an old BAT scene that I know works and I just start with that. 

imo 3ds Max 2012 is the best version of 3ds Max to use for BATing purposes, so I'd use that one. 

[art128 4,618]

Aaah, thanks Jason. That seemed to have worked, somehow. I loaded a new scene and it worked perfectly first try. 

I have a new question now but more technical: Does 3dsmax takes advantages of more cores or more Ghz?

I read online that it uses 1 core... But after launching a render i saw all four cores of my CPU at 100%, I don't understand is it single threaded or not?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

In general it's multithreaded, but it depends on specifically what's happening because there's different parts to max, and the different parts have their own different parts. So for example we render using mental ray which is actually separate from 3ds max, and then when rendering with mental ray there's the translation phase and the final gather phase etc. I'd expect that nowadays pretty much everything would be multithreaded just because of how intense rendering tends to be. What you read about it using one core might have been referring to some particular part of it or maybe an old version. I don't have the specific technical knowledge about it but if people were limited to only one core it would be very very hard to actually render anything. 

And a fun fact: the buckets (the little squares that dance around doing work in your render window) by default correspond to one core, so if you have 4 cores you should have 4 buckets.  

[art128 4,618]

Thanks for the answer.  

I google around while at work, and apparently while modeling 3dsmax is single threaded but it goes multi threaded when rendering. That's cool to know.

Thus I bought a e5-2670. This should be good.

And yeah about the buckets, I remember when I was still using my 8350 I had eight of them. 

[rsc204 21,808]

13 hours ago, art128 said:

But after launching a render i saw all four cores of my CPU at 100%

For any task, if you see significant workload on all cores, you can be sure it's multicore compatible. Note how by comparison, SC4 never switches from one main core, any other core activity is usually some other applications working in the background.

[thingfishs 416]

Hi,

I've setup bat4max again (V5 with max 2012), and after a few resolved issues I come to this, a nuisance really. I can only apply materials to the editor and scene if I start max normally - but I can only export from it if I start it in administrator mode. Particularly when making small props it results in half your time waiting for max to load again. Is anyone aware of a way around this?

Cheers

[Odainsaker 2,134]

I'll hazard a guess that perhaps you have 3ds Max along with the BAT4Max plugin installed by default in Windows under the Program Files directory.  The Program Files directory in Windows is protected by the system and requires administrator permissions for changes, and as BAT4Max does a lot of file writing to an output folder nestled within the 3ds Max program files, if your 3ds Max installation is under Program Files, then it will need administrator permissions when carrying out BAT4Max functions.  You may need to either adjust the permissions granted to 3ds Max and BAT4Max, or reinstall 3ds Max and the BAT4Max plugin outside the default protected Program Files directory.

[thingfishs 416]

Absolutely correct, thanks mate.

I couldn't get it to work by adjusting permissions but yes, it was installed in program files and now with it in the C: root folder and bat4max reinstalled, we have a fully functioning machine again. Something in the back of my head tells me this is pretty much bat4max 101, but some things just get lost...

[vivarenedius 9]

i got the app but issue on export

[Jasoncw 11,840]

12 hours ago, vivarenedius said:

i got the app but issue on export

You need to give more details for us to help you.  

[vivarenedius 9]

ok