I don't seem to be able to get max's new viewport shadows working with materials that have an .fx shader or a normal bump material applied to them. They work just fine with standard materials. Has anyone got this working?

Check out the new ShaderFX release from lumonix.com. Otherwise, that's correct, real-time shadows don't work unless you are using an fx shader that uses them (and only a few max shaders use it do to the specifics of how these things are often set up, though IIRC there is a sample max shader with shadow mapping).

Solar,

If you'd like to get your hands dirty with a little bit of shader coding, I can probably show you how to edit your shader so that it will support shadows. You have to add a couple of lines of code to it in various places so that shadows will work.

Otherwise, your best bet is probably to grab the new version of ShaderFX - which will allow you to create any shader you want and then just check a box to add shadows to it.

Let me know.

-Ben