Hey all. I’m trying to find an installer for GMax. Its not on Turbosquid anymore but because its a free 3d modeling software (and because i’m a teacher I cant pirate a copy of 3ds max) I want to use it in my classes to teach students 3d modeling and get them to make some Halo maps. Theres a pre-installed version from achive.com but it doesnt work for me. Any help would be really useful.

I think even if you found an installer for gmax, you'd have to bypass registration because discreet doesn't exist in a way that gmax would understand anymore.

It used to be popular enough that you could find out how to bypass registration everywhere though but AFAIK that method is long gone. Windows Enabler works though, for clicking on the greyed-out registration button.


It'd probably be a hassle to run on modern windows though since gmax likes to open up into memory but not create a window when it does open. So it gets stuck in memory and you have to force terminate it.

How I got it to work back in 2017 was to make a Copy of the gmax executable and then patch the Copy exe to run on one single CPU core with imagecfg -u

(imagecfg from robpol imagecfg)

Starting with GMax is gonna make them hate 3d modelling, if you want to use freeware I'd start with something like Sketchup which is super intuitive although it generates a lot of garbage (Which can be remedied with a few plugins if you want to use it for Halo such as Solid Inspector 2, Clean Up 3, and extra cleaning on 3dsmax/gmax/blender(ew) if that's not enough)

If you're dead set on using an ancient version of an ancient crapware such as gmax though, I found this: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/gmax-12-registration-workaround

Also, maybe ask them for student licenses? A lot of companies love to give those away for free because it's an investment to have people new to the industry learn their software and not the competition's

Ok. So I found a version of gmax with a workaround registration, however that workaround didn't function on users logging in to a computer from a network. Fortunately, 3ds max 5 is now available off of the internet archive so I just got that instead.

Personally, I want to steer clear of sketch up cause I consider it rather trashy. My alternative is Blender, but I started 3d modeling with Gmax and never had any issues with it. I feel there is a sort of software Connoisseur sort of ideology going around on this forum in regards to gmax vs 3ds max.