Floor and Tiles · Documentation
FAQ & troubleshooting
The questions that come in most often, each with the short answer first.
Nothing is laid
| The spline is open | An outline has to be closed. Close it in the spline's Vertex level, or use a slab. A spline with several closed loops is fine; the inner ones become holes. |
| The object is a mesh with no faces in the plane | A mesh is tiled on the silhouette of its faces in the plane Auto picked, which is the one it covers most of. A thin wall picked as a floor has nothing there; set General › Plane by hand, or look at the pivot: the plane is the object's own. |
| The border is wider than the room | A band wider than half a corridor leaves no field at all. Narrow it in Borders. |
| Cull Below, Missing Boards, Enabled | Check General › Cull Below is not at 99, Board Randomization › Chance is not at 100%, and the row is Enabled in Areas. |
The pattern I picked is not laid
The free edition lays Basic only. Every other pattern and borders are Pro; the rollout says so when a Pro pattern is picked, and the setting is kept so the scene opens whole once a key is entered. A paid copy that has not been activated behaves as the free one: open About › Licence… and paste the key from the Gumroad receipt.
The licence
| Where is the key? | In the Gumroad receipt e-mail, and in your Gumroad library under the product. The same key activates all of your machines, up to the activation limit of the licence. |
| Does it need the internet? | Once, to activate; the key is then trusted for fourteen days without a connection and checked again when there is one. On a machine with no route out, such as a firewalled workstation, the plugin runs as Pro for those fourteen days after each successful check. |
| Render nodes | Render nodes need no licence. Backburner, Deadline and 3dsmaxbatch render a scene built on a licensed workstation without a key: the node lays what the scene says, Pro patterns included. Nothing has to be installed on the farm beyond the plugin itself. |
| A new machine | Activate it with the same key. If the limit is reached, write and I will release an old machine. |
| Refunds | A refunded key stops working within a fortnight; the scene stays, laid as Basic. |
Installing
| The button is not on the toolbar | The installer adds it once, to the main toolbar. If the toolbar was reset, add it from Customize › Customize User Interface › category Floor and Tiles, or use Create › Geometry › Floor and Tiles. |
| The plugin does not load | One .mzp covers 3ds Max 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027; older versions are not supported. Check %APPDATA%\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins\FloorAndTiles.bundle exists and that Max was restarted after the drop. A second copy of the bundle in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins from an older install takes precedence; remove that one. |
| Uninstalling | Run uninstall.ms from the bundle folder, or delete the bundle folder. Scenes keep their floors as ordinary meshes only if you collapse them first. |
Scenes and versions
| A scene from an older version | Opens as it was: settings are stored by name, and a setting the old scene did not have takes its default. A scene saved by a newer version opens in an older one with the settings the older one knows. |
| Opening a scene without the plugin | Max shows a missing-plugin box and the floor is an empty object. Collapse the floor to an Editable Poly before handing a scene to someone without the plugin; the tiles, IDs and mapping survive the collapse, the settings do not. |
| Sharing a floor | Presets › Copy Code puts the whole floor on the clipboard; Paste Code lays it on any floor. The picked object and the offsets are not carried. |
The mesh
| Too many polygons | Thickness 0 and Generate topology off is the lightest floor: one face per tile. Cap bottom doubles the faces; Generate grout adds a surface; a bevel adds a band per edge. |
| Board Randomization does nothing | The boards are held apart by the joint. With Grout at 0 there is no room to move; raise the joint or Max Overlap. |
| The texture is squeezed on the planks | Turn on Mapping › One repeat per element: a plank photo then lands on the plank, whatever its proportions. |
| The floor faces down | The spline was drawn the other way round. General › Flip. |
Anything else: write, with the scene or a preset code, and which version of Max.
