Hey there, I'm sure this has been answered before, I think I have actually read something about the solution here on polycount a while back.

Anyway, every time I render something, or bake something in max I see the little render progress screen, but I can't seem to find the actual render window. It seems its popping up somewhere off screen and no matter what I do I can't get a hold of it or view it in any way.

I'm pretty sure that I Hit some strange hot key when trying to render something real quick, and haven't been able to get the render screen to appear since. I have tried to minimize max and look for it, and even went into the max ini file trying to adjust the render window dimensions, but nothing seems to fix the issue.

I'm afraid I might have to set max back to default settings or reinstall it, but that would be a huge pain in the arse since I have tons of plug-ins on my version of max. I'm using max 2011 x64 btw.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It's possible that the window's there but off-screen (which might happen if you've recently used a dual monitor setup).

Click the Rendered Frame Window button (or Rendering > Rendered Frame Window...), and if you can't see the window, try pressing Alt+Space. Click Move, and then tap your arrow keys a bit before moving your mouse around.

Brad,

Hey man, glad to see you got a position at Escalation.

I think Elyaradine may be on to the problem and solution:

If you lose a window off screen (doesn't come up with you press the taskbar button):
1) Click on the button to activate the window.
2) Press Alt + Spacebar and select Move from the menu (don't try to move it yet).
3) Press any one of the arrow keys to attach the window to the mouse.
4) Use the mouse to position the window on the screen.
5) Exit Max to save the screen position.
This works for other Windows apps as well.

Also, anyone who has two monitors and or changed resolution and have panels [material editor, environment, rendering] going off the top of the screen:
-move your mouse pointer over the very edge of any panel [so the mouse pointers changes to a double edge arrow]
-left mouse click and hold
-now use the up or down arrow key [while still holding down the left mouse button] to select either the top or bottom of the panel
-now use the arrow keys again to resize the panel

I use UltraMon, it gives you a "move to other monitor" function to the Alt + Spacebar menu.



So you press Alt+Space, Up Arrow twice and hit enter and it will pop on screen.


I've also seen it suggested that you delete/move your 3dsmax.ini file but I'm not sure that works on 2009 and higher... and that's kind of dicey... since its probably going to do reset a bunch of other junk.

You can also try this script on scriptspot that resets all the windows to their default position, not sure how reliable it is tho.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/reset-windows

One thing I had work with Maya was just to disable my second monitor. This would force any windows which were not already visible on monitor 1 to pop to monitor 1.

Not sure if you are using two monitors. Hope you get it solved.

Elyaradine: Hey your right man, Thanks a ton! Actually, the first time I tried, it didn't work. That's only because I had to hit f9 then IMEDDIATLY press Alt+Space, otherwise the scene renders so quick I miss my chance and get the dialogue for the main 3ds max application window.
Anyway, worked like a charm, Thank you.

swytch: Hey thanks a lot for the kind words and great advice. Yeah, working at Escalation is a dream come true for me. Seriously awesome guys over there and plenty of cool stuff we are working on. I hope the classes your teaching are going well man!

Vig: Thanks for the great advice as always man. I'm going to go ahead and install UltraMon here real soon before I forget. It was indeed because I switched up my monitors.

kodde: yeah, I'm actually using 3 monitors now, but I recently switched to 3 from 4 monitors. lol. Basically, there isn't enough room for 4 monitors on the crappy little desk I have. This all happened due to me moving to Dallas, but for some reason I thought the render window was working after I set things up here, and then disappeared. Seems more likely that it was never working with my new setup and I just hadn't realized it till recently.

I'm sure your method would have worked tho. Thanks dude!

Glad it worked eventually. ^_^