3ds max Getting Started Setting preferences Moving on to the files tab. Kind of importantly, I think it's a good idea to enable this switch that says convert local file paths to relative. I'll turn that on, and now anywhere that a file path is displayed in 3DS Max, it will be displayed to me relative to the location of my current project. It's going to store an absolute path for every asset. In other words, it's going to know what drive letter the asset is located on. But for the purposes of self contained projects, we want all of the internal links to be relative to the project route. We don't actually want to store the project's drive letter or volume name or its network location. And the reason for that is that so that our projects can be portable. And that means we can pick up an entire project and move it somewhere else, and all of the links internal to that project will still be preserved. And that's what this switch accomplishes for us. Technically it is storing the absolute path and merely displaying the relative path to the user. but from a practical standpoint, if this switch is off, then we could potentially run into some issues with our file paths getting mangled. So I do recommend that you leave that on. So moving on, we've got the view ports tab, and in here this is also very important. This is where we can choose and configure the display driver. And in 3DS Max, the sort of software module that draws images in the view ports here, that's the display driver and it goes by the name Nitrous. And we currently have Nitrous at the Direct3D level 11 feature set. And that's a good setting, and we do want to leave it at that. However, if you're having some issues on your computer, if 3DS Max is flickering or doing strange things, first you should look at updating your display driver, whether it's an Nvidia or AMD. You'll want to find the appropriate software and try to update that driver. And if that doesn't work you can go in here and choose a different driver. Click on choose driver. And from this pull down list we can actually downgrade the driver to an older, possibly dumber display driver. For example, if you are doing a remote session, maybe you're logged on through remote desktop, you might need to choose a software renderer instead of these hardware renderers. But again, you want to use the highest level Direct3D you can whenever possible. So leave that as it is. And even though I didn't change anything, I got a warning saying that the driver changes will take effect the next time you start 3DS Max
