I looked, and the last postings I found were from 2006.
My team is a mac school, and has two gorgeous labs of Macs. They have boot camp, and installed 3dsmax. However, when they reboot into OSX and then back into Windows, the software looses its authentication. I only got a fuzzy brief today from the lead teacher, not the animation teacher, but thought I would see if anyone else has had success or troubles when running with bootcamp.
Boot Camp should handle that well, or pick up a copy of VMWare Fusion. It works just as good as Parallels but handles video hardware acceleration better.
My school has a new mac lab just installed this year that is for nothing but Maya, and one thing that I have found from it is that it is extremely powerful compared to 3Ds Max. Also it’s very very complicated to learn according to the teacher.
Ive found that it is very different. The thing I like about it over 3ds Max, the student/personal edition is free. And while it does put an ugly watermark on that is quite a small price to pay to learn such a powerful software (Autodesk | 3D Design, Engineering & Construction Software)
Back to the topic at hand, a quick google search revealed several threads on Apple and Autodesk forums saying that this is an issue.
Autodesk | 3D Design, Engineering & Construction Software is the hot fix that is suggested in the thread. I cannot recall if this is what I originally set up 3ds with (This was close to a year ago) My suggestion, try that. If it doesnt help run a couple google searches (3ds max and boot camp licensing issues) There are dozens of forums with potential solutions. Hope this helps.
EDIT: Reasoning, Mac’s have Sata controllers in them if I recall, (Least my MBP does) the hot fix I linked to is due to a problem with Autodesk’s licensing and the Sata controllers, this does not appear to be a boot camp issue.
I’ve used Maya before, and…well…it’s an experience. Just trying to navigate through the hundreds of menus available at the click of a button is pretty darn confusing. I much prefer the 3DSMAX layout.
There are, however, some things Maya does better than Max.
That would be cool if they allowed using Blender too. http://www.blender.org/ It has a steep learning curve (at least for me), but the people who can use it, use it well.
as for the mac question:
I have no idea why it does that. Theoretically it should be fine and not complain. But, you could try Virtualbox instead. http://www.virtualbox.org/