For some reason, my diffuse textures look really faint in the viewport in Max 2010 (if it's set to Hardware Display with Maps). They look fine when rendered. If I set it to Standard Display with Maps, my normal map and specular don't show up, and the diffuse looks too dark. Is there any way to fix this? It makes it really hard and time consuming to texture something (in addition to Max not auto-updating maps). I'm starting to think upgrading to 2010 was a big mistake.

Why don't you just use a viewport shader? Xol's viewport shader is a nice choice for that.

Also, sorry if I'm preaching to the choir here, but if your textures are blurry in the viewport, make sure to check the Direct3D configurations "match bitmap size as close as possible" and texel and mipmap to none, so your textures look sharp, and not blurry.

They're not blurry. I already set up my viewport options for that. They're just really faint (like white tinted and undercontrasted). I guess I'll try xoliul's shader.

Is it possible that the Ambient/Diffuse colour values are something strange? I find that I usually have to tweak them in some way; even at 100% self-illuminating, for some reason 3dsMax still likes to shade stuff. Or likes to be confounding.

Originally Posted by Vrav

Is it possible that the Ambient/Diffuse colour values are something strange? I find that I usually have to tweak them in some way; even at 100% self-illuminating, for some reason 3dsMax still likes to shade stuff. Or likes to be confounding.

I messed with those and they didn't seem to do anything. Anyways, it's irrelevant now because I'm using xoliul's shader which works fine.