Severe Jaggies in 3Ds Max

acealmighty13

As of this morning, I'm picking up severe jagged lines in 3Ds Max 2013.  I've tried closing down the software and restarting it.  I think I may have accidentally hit a shortcut key I shouldn't have to cause this.  Last night, it worked pretty great.  If I hit certain camera angles, it looks fine but there are not many angles that work out.

I'm unsure of what's causing this and it's quite annoying.  I've had minor hiccups but they usually smooth out pretty quickly. 

monster

This issue is known as Z fighting. It's when the camera can't decide with object is in front, and flips between the two. Could be a few things.

Size

Your object may be very small or very large. Try changing your unit settings to metric and create a 1m x 1m box to check size.

Scale

Your object could be the right size, but have an exaggerated scale transform. Reset xForms from the Utility Panel.

Viewport Clipping

If you know your size or scale is exaggerated, but need to maintain that you can change the viewport clip planes to help with the z fighting. Enable viewport clipping and adjust the bottom handle if your objects are large, and the upper handle if they are tiny.

For example, on one project I was modeling dice at real world scale. I needed to adjust the viewport clipping to zoom around properly.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Viewport-Clipping.html

acealmighty13

This image is in Orthographic and when I go into Perspective it gets even worse.  I've been working on this project awhile and this just now popped up.  Everything is set to scale.  I'm using a grid spacing of 8cm with CM as my units.  Cabinets are measured as close to real world measurements as I can get.  Trying to remain with the grid for easy snapping.  And I currently don't have any cameras placed within the file.

I have noticed when I try to rotate the ViewCube it makes a huge drastic jump and my model is nowhere near where I can view it and I just moved the Cube slightly.

I also messed around with the Viewport Clipping slider and it doesn't seem to be helping.  I'm going to export the models I'm keeping and going to import them into a new file after shutting the software down.  See if that does anything.

monster

Sounds like your scene is very organized. Another cause of this problem is when models are positioned far away from the world origin [0,0,0]. This could also cause the ViewCube to behave oddly. Check the objects position and see if that helps.

spacefrog

What are your system units set to ? Don't forget that Max as seperated settings for the units it displays vs. units it internally uses ( = system units ).  All the jumping and jagged lines sound like you have got a system unit scale issue . Or do you have created some far far off object by accident ? or some far far off isolated, stray vertex ?
Finally it can happen that a viewport simply gets totally broken.
In that case simply un-maximize your viewports, set each one to some different otrthographic view and hit zoom-extends in each one. That should reinitallize the viewport transform matrices to something meaningfull...