It happened so many times already but I always forget about the damn enu folder, which can totally fuck up 3ds max.
today 3ds Max wouldn’t start anymore after a crash and it took me 5 hours to find out it’s because of the enu folder, which needed to be deleted again.
I uninstalled plugins, c++, did other things and then remembered the second enu folder location, in the user app data folder. And then things went smoothly. Bare the fact that all my shortcuts are gone again, my layout is away and my modifier buttons have to be redone one more time.
It happens so frequently and there is no easy way to backup all the individual modifications.
I hate that folder with all my guts. What problem does it have with innocent users who just want to get their job done?
I always save a copy of that folder once I’m done setting everything up. You can overwrite it when things break. If only there was a way to save the whole ui and all scripts in a file that can also be used for migrating to another max version.
yeah, I have that too, but sometimes that breaks 3ds max again. So began to save everything separetely. You cant save the modifier buttons though and, yes, bringing all the scripts back together is a pain too.
This software needs an overhaul..
I am using version 2015 btw and I dont think anything changed until now.. it is frustrating. makes me want to switch..but .. you know
I would say Max 2020 is a lot more stable and it has some really nice and new features. But I have to concur that user workspaces are not saved reliably and max still loses everything every couple month - usually when opening or closing more than one max at the same time.
There you go.
and I usually work on multiple projects or just have a second copy of max open so I can quickly continue when vray gpu crashes (which happens very frequently)
AD knows about it, there is even a bug thread about it. A developer answered and just said, wait when you close max one after another. They did not seem to have considered that people would open more than one max.
I stopped opening more than one session a while back. I think it broke in one version, so I just avoid it all together still. I know the copy/paste scripts stopped working with more than one MAX session open.
I had fewer problems with the old ENU folder, MaxStart files, UI and shortcuts back in the day. All my troubles or rather major troubles begin whenever the first UI revamp / high res monitor / new icons / Maya color scheme happened. It’s better now BUT, I basically recreate my UI semi from scratch.
I’ll start the latest version of Max, save a new fresh Max start, then one by one import, keyboard shortcuts, quad menus, custom color scheme etc. saving new versions of the MaxStart and Custom UI first, then immediately reserving the UI which points you to the default Max CUI file and save that otherwise tons of settings won’t stick.
This annoying, round about, painful method has finally begun to work for me the past two versions of Max but dang it’s the antithesis of straight forward.
Should be a single UI File with everything but alas I feel like I’m back in old AutoCAD land juggling million config files every time a new version of Max is out. Sigh…
Ahah, you’d like to see me burn, eh?
It’d be quite a dangerous (not to mention overly long and tedious, and hard to maintain and customise) thing to do through scripting.
We can hope it’ll get sorted natively, though.
The AD Max team reads us.
It will never happen.
Unless AD will completely rewrite 3ds max, which would be long overdue but would have so many rattrails they wouldnt know where to begin.
It would probably take 10 years and eat all resources… They try at least, the workspaces are saveable that way you can save your UI to a single file (not the scripts, though).
But might not work between versions I don’t know. I’m curious if any other 3d app can migrate all scripts and the whole UI reliably between versions. Probably not.
Nuke comes to mind.
I copy my .nuke folder, and i am set.
It also checkpoints the file one’s working on automatically and very often.
Truth be told, filesizes tend to differ quite a bit (a few Kb to a few Mb in Nuke, even for big comps).
I may have been lucky, or too light on the loading of it, but i cannot recall a single instance of comprehensive mess-up with Nuke, ever.
Yeah that damn ENU folder, even when everything is setup and you back it up there’s still some things that get broken when you restore that version after a max meltdown. I’ve tried but there’s always things that are broken afterwards. I set up custom workspaces with templates, toolbars, shortcuts, modifiers, etc then I disable save UI configuration on Exit and I’ve noticed I have less problems with things going to the shitter when all hell breaks loose and Max decides it’s time to waste my time again.
Hey, never knew there was an option for that! I’ll have to find it and disable it. Don’t even know why it’s there if there is so much trouble coming from it and I have to backup everything by hand anyway
I was under the impression they fixed like this in 2018. Maybe a big fix somehow brought it back. I can confidently say that the best way to avoid this problem is simple, just don’t open or close a Max instance within 5 or so seconds of each other. The ENU folder gets written to when you open and when you close max, so the most common way for this folder to get corrupted is because someone tried to open 2 copies of max one right after another, or they closed and opened a copy at roughly the same time. Since i stopped doing that I haven’t had a problem in a good 5-6 years. (Also, wait 5 seconds of Max crashes before starting a new max instance.) It takes a bit of training to break the habit, but it works. It really does.
Also keep in mind you can backup your toolbars from the Customize User Interface menu and your hotkeys. You can also try Save Custom UI Scheme.
I did have a problem where I couldn’t open Max a while back which was a result of my A/V software (Avast). It was waiting for a reboot that didn’t come fast enough and windows updated while Avast was waiting on the reboot. For some reason when that happened when I started max it created a file in my usermacros (C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax \2016 - 64bit\ENU\usermacros) folder that read like 4588382_temp.mcr. If I disabled A/V and deleted that file, then Max would start but the next time I tried max it would be back. The ONLY permanent fix after 2 days of messing with it I could find was to uninstall Avast, reboot, and re-install Avast. This has happened to me 2x now, and both times it was because windows updated after Avast did and I didn’t reboot in time. (I freakin’ hate rebooting, my machine is technically a server and it takes a while to start up so I avoid it.) Anyways, hopefully that helps someone…
