I have Max 2025 and 2026 installed.
The Corona updater recognizes both and installs in them without errors.
In Max 2025 it works great but in 2026 it stays invisible to Max. No Corona renderer shown and no Chaos Corona Toolbar available.
I figured it must be an installer problem.
So I run the installer again and select only Max 2026.
It installs over what it had from the first try, but deletes the 2025 installation! And 2026 still has the same problem.
What’s left to try, is to uninstall both and install only for 2026. I’m not too optimistic but you never know.
Also I could just extract the files and figure out how to install them manually.
I’ll update the post later with the results but maybe somebody knows how to balance the *.cuix and the rest of the 2025 configuration with the 2026.
I’m happy to say the problem has been resolved but no idea how it came about.
The last try with the manual installation gave the same problem.
I even traced the loading with Process Monitor but nothing strange showed up other than, in Max 2025 the Corona plugin (CoronaMax2025.dlr) was loaded, followed by CoronaMaxUtils2025.dlt and the rest of the files after them. All good.
In Max 2026, the plugin never loaded, CoronaMaxUtils2026.dlt showed up a few times in the Process Monitor’s log, and then nada. Same problem.
In 2026, there were some traces from vrayinstancer2026.dlo (a V-Ray dlo) that looked for some VRayCoronaScatterMod classes. It couldn’t find a few of them. This ScatterMod thing looks like some function in a dll (I couldn’t find its name in my computer). Maybe nothing relevant or a mismatch with some version.
And then I got tired looking at logs and gave up
I renamed the ENU inside C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2026 - 64bit\ to make it invisible to 3ds Max, started up 2026 and it loaded everything up
Some toolbar positioning and all’s well now with both Max’es.
