Hi Tokola,
It's unlikely. I'm not sure why you wouldn't be able to modify the materials - it works for me in my copy of 2015 so I'm not sure what would be causing the problem unless there's some kind of issue between commercial and student versions of Max. You could try seeing if you have a "dead" copy of a material by clearing the editor and using the eyedropper tool to regrab the material. You could also try merging the geometry into a fresh Max file to see if that clears it up.
MassFX is Max's physics sim plugin, and in this case you're getting the error because I saved the file out of Max 2016 into 2015 format. It can be used to calculate physics simulations and bake them into keyframes. Those can then be used as a canned animation in Vizard for things like rockslides, earthquakes, explosions, etc. See the attached zip file for a sample.
