n00b mistakes you've made.

CJE

Thought it might be fun to have a thread showing moments of 3D "blondness", I'll start it off...

1. Spent 2 days trying to fix seams on a normal map, couldn't figure it out. Tried painting, rebaking, fixing UV's, adding more padding, everything. Turns out I left my Light Tracer on from baking the AO Map, lol.

Sean VanGorder

I'm guilty of the ol' "Hit X, hide your translation widget, get pissed off, bitch and moan, restart Max" trick

Ghostscape

I think every Max user has, at one point or another, queued up a long render to texture, walked away, and found that they didn't add all of their high poly model as a reference object in their projection.

Piflik

Not really game art related, but just yesterday I tried to render a Volume Light with MR Photographic Exposure Control set to Daytime Exterior...didn't work...

mayaterror

I thought I was hot shite and had discovered a big workaround to the UV unwrapping flow (I was just starting to get the hang of unwrapping). I was using the diffuse texture and was placing faces according to the details on the texture. This worked fine wile I was only working with diffuse maps, and got to the point where I was whipping out full characters in a single day, modeled, unwrapped, textured, rigged, and skinned. Once I wanted to start on normal mapping, I quickly realized I was screwwwwwwwed. Of course it was a good learning experience and my normal mapping research is what led me to Polycount, so it wasn't all bad. But realizing I had to re-unwrap close to 30 characters.... ouch.

Bruno Afonseca

pressing space and locking the selection without noticing, and then get pissed about it. happens around 5x a day

Moosey_G

Pretending I didn't have to make uvmaps if I made really cool models.

Progg

When first learning to do normal maps, after freezing transformations on mirrored objects in Maya (causes the normals to flip), and then getting pissed off and blaming Maya and every other application I could find for breaking my maps.... Until I realized the normals were reversed.

acc

Friend A is working on a model in Maya and has not saved for a while,
Friend A leaves computer briefly.
Friend B walks over and slices a bunch of random planes all over model because he's bored.
Friend A tires to correct this only to find that the 'undo' command no longer works.

Freaking out ensues.

Sliced up model actually ends up in the final project (luckily, it didn't have to animate).

Months later someone discovers that Caps Lock breaks Maya's shortcuts.

Motherfu-

ENODMI

HA, Progg, guilty of that one... freakn broke my brain figuring it out too:)

Kewop Decam

acc wrote: »

Friend A is working on a model in Maya and has not saved for a while,
Friend A leaves computer briefly.
Friend B walks over and slices a bunch of random planes all over model because he's bored.
Friend A tires to correct this only to find that the 'undo' command no longer works.

Freaking out ensues.

Sliced up model actually ends up in the final project (luckily, it didn't have to animate).

Months later someone discovers that Caps Lock breaks Maya's shortcuts.

Motherfu-

LOL!!!

Well, it's doesn't "break" them, Maya is just case sensitive.

Progg

acc wrote: »

.

Months later someone discovers that Caps Lock breaks Maya's shortcuts.

Motherfu-

I remember that happened to me once. Caps was on and I had no idea and I was literally hitting the keyboard going "WTF...". Restarted, deleted maya preferences, finally my roommate walked over and hit the Caps key. I felt stupid. lmao.

mLichy

I always tend to leave on Constrain to Edge in max, and wonder wtf is going on.

Also, the forgetting HP parts sometimes happens to me, or projection gets ticked off in the render to texture, and I'm like why the fuck is it rendering so slow.

Muzzoid

The first model i made was in rhino 3d and was made using nurbs .

Ben Apuna

I was once working with a perfectly fine model, UVs, and normal map in Max but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it was displaying with seams everywhere. Hours later I realized the normal map was plugged directly into the bump slot of the material without a "normal bump" in between.

MustBeDestiny

I was almost done unwrapping a character and realized that I hadn't collapsed some verts together on my edit poly. -.-

mLichy

^ you can collapse your stack and just re-apply the unwrap and continue? Or did u unwrap below your Edit Poly?

willy-wilson

Forgetting in maya to convert smooth mesh to poly before baking otherwise it doesn't work.

ScoobyDoofus

Not working hard enough or long enough. Everybody else is. Always work harder AND smarter.

aniceto

made half a set of morph targets before realising the symmetry I collapsed had welded the middle of the lips together.

not knowing why a scene is only being lit by the environment, then realising the main light was pointing in the wrong direction and i hadn't noticed because i was working in an orthographic view

oh and painting on the wrong layer in photoshop, of course

Sean VanGorder

aniceto wrote: »

oh and painting on the wrong layer in photoshop, of course

All day everyday :thumbup:

breakneck

make duplicate of some bricks - 20 or so - then unwrap eachone individually only to stack them all in the same uv space anyways - WTF was i thinking!!!

sama.van

To run melscript in the Python`s window searching why it doesn't work

PredatorGSR

I created a save action in Photoshop, so that I could hit f2 to save the diffuse. Then tinting it darker, updating in Maya, tweaking, updating, tweaking, updating, and not getting the results I wanted. Turns out the action saved it as a copy so my Maya scene never updated, and all those tweaks never showed up and I didn't notice for about 15 mins.

SimonT

A friend created a sphere and activated "show normals" and said excited: "look, the sphere has hairs!"

SimonT

I never understood the "snapping " in Max (was so easy in Maya). Funny thing: i even don't understand it today.

boyluya

Before, I never used the edit poly modifier to add my support edges. So when it was time to make the low poly, I had to manually select them one by one and delete which was kinda tedious.

The Flying Monk

Hide all of the layers except the one I need to work on. Go to create a new object but nothing is there, Took me a moment to work out that I had the hidden layer active and the new object was just hidden.

Then I had an object that was a spline with a sweep modifier on it. When I turned of sweep for to edit the base spline it disappeared. Turns out Hide by Category/Shapes was ticked.

You think I would start learning not to do this crap after a while.

Mark Dygert

mLichy wrote: »

I always tend to leave on Constrain to Edge in max, and wonder wtf is going on.

I do this sometimes. The last time I was trying to snap one vert to another and it would only pop to a spot on the home edge. As I said out loud "It's like its constrained to the edge for some stupid reason" it dawned on me...

kodde

Caps Lock in Maya was so frustrating the first time it happend.

Lamont

sama.van wrote: »

To run melscript in the Python`s window searching why it doesn't work

n00b!!

odium

Something I find myself doing every so often is working on a mesh, importing another one, then saving over the imported one by mistake, thus deleting it in the process with my current WIP object...

I don't get angry, I just usually *faceplam*...

...then get angry

Ged

spent 2 days trying to figure out why xnormal was rendering out really wierd normal maps for my character only to find out he was scaled waaaay too small for the bake to work.

renderhjs

Asking my first boss what this dongle thing is and why I need it for Max. That was like 10 years ago - I never saw any of those before Obviously he started laughing at me.

Spitfire

spent an hour or so searching for errors trying to find why maya wouldnt display my normalmaps, i had everything set up right, i just forgot to hit "6"

r_fletch_r

while in college and first learning max i remodeled an entire model because i hid it and couldnt unhide it.

Ended up uhiding it accidentally right at the end of the project.:poly142:

ZacD

Made some "cool" looking stuff in maya.
Hit smooth 2 or 3 times
realize I forgot to save
Maya crashes

Not really 3D related but still in my ghetto highschool 3D classes.
In high school a friend and I were messing with audio for animations, we were f*ckign around with reversing audio clips and figured out "cuff oh knee bar" in sounded like f*ck "teachers name". And we accidently left the clips on the flash drive, luckly it was the last few days of school and I don't think she ever found out about it.

rollin

don't know how to copy (clone...) an object.. I said bad words to max that time..

Neox

sXe Seany wrote: »

I'm guilty of the ol' "Hit X, hide your translation widget, get pissed off, bitch and moan, restart Max" trick

i add to this, everyone might have found that motherfucking edgepadding doesn't work anymore, it did before, why isn't it adding it?
and days later you remember its a post effect that gets applied after rendering

Andreas

boyluya wrote: »

Before, I never used the edit poly modifier to add my support edges. So when it was time to make the low poly, I had to manually select them one by one and delete which was kinda tedious.

I still do this, because I find my shortcuts (W,E,R) feck up when modelling within the modifier, is there something I am doing wrong?

noob mistakes...I've lost (hidden) gizmos, collapsed a subdivision into a model when I didn't intend to, deleted files I didn't mean too, losing some cool work, loads of stuff. This was way back in the day though.

MegaMoogle

When modeling I use a lot of shortcuts in Max. Alt+L and Alt+R specifically. And very often while using these shortcuts I'll accidentally hit the spacebar which locks the scene. I'll start clicking around and get really irritated, until I realize what I did, and then feel dumb.

Racer445

I made specular by just adjusting contrast/levels for a while. I also used to preview my bakes with an offline renderer.

TheMadArtist

Painting in the wrong layer in photoshop is a big one for me. In max, I'm bad about hitting the space bar accidentally and then wondering what the hell is going on when I can't select anything.

Hitting browse instead of open in Photoshop and opening the goddamn abode bridge.

Trying to grab polys to unwrap in the Editable Poly pull down and not the Unwrap UVWs pulldown.

Creating geometry in max on a layer that you have hidden and wondering what the fuck is going on when you don't see it.

Best one I did at school was setting up an animation to render overnight and then getting back and learning that I rendered everything to the desktop.

Progg

PredatorGSR wrote: »

I created a save action in Photoshop, so that I could hit f2 to save the diffuse. Then tinting it darker, updating in Maya, tweaking, updating, tweaking, updating, and not getting the results I wanted. Turns out the action saved it as a copy so my Maya scene never updated, and all those tweaks never showed up and I didn't notice for about 15 mins.

15 minutes? ... pfff. I did that for 1 and 1/2 hours once lmao.

Mark Dygert

TheMadArtist wrote: »

Hitting browse instead of open in Photoshop and opening the goddamn abode bridge.

Ha I've done that, then thought nothing was going to happen and opened the file manually, then a few seconds later while I'm working bridge pops up...

[Deleted User]

I had some ZSpheres, and I previewed the skin, then proceeded to sculpt on it for like an hour. Then I realized there was something I wanted to change about part of it, so I hit Q to go back to working with the ZSpheres, made the change, then hit Q again, thinking I'd go back to what I was doing like how it works with subd levels. I freaked out for a bit. The post is still around here somewhere. In the current version, there's a warning dialog that pops up in that scenario. I laughed when I first saw it.

Ahrkey

PredatorGSR wrote: »

I created a save action in Photoshop, so that I could hit f2 to save the diffuse. Then tinting it darker, updating in Maya, tweaking, updating, tweaking, updating, and not getting the results I wanted. Turns out the action saved it as a copy so my Maya scene never updated, and all those tweaks never showed up and I didn't notice for about 15 mins.

<--- Except that I forgot to change the action to a new directory/file so it kept overwriting some other(previous) texture and not the one I've assigned in the material editor.

SHEPEIRO

TheMadArtist wrote: »

Hitting browse instead of open in Photoshop and opening the goddamn abode bridge.

rushing to go home at the end of the day win 7 asks if you want to force quit PS...not realizing you have a bunch of unsaved PSDs in there you click yes and then watch in horror as you see them pop up then all those lovely layers dissappear forever leaving you only the raw exported formats....nooooo

Sam Hatami

Saving to the wrong textures and wondering why your changes doesn't show, and before you figure out you saved it in the wrong place, you went and undid all the work you spent doing cause "it didn't make any difference" ;P...

Progg

qlz wrote: »

<--- Except that I forgot to change the action to a new directory/file so it kept overwriting some other(previous) texture and not the one I've assigned in the material editor.

This. Fun times. "WHY ARE NOT UPDATING... *paint giant red X in the middle* ... *hit action button* *Reload in Maya* WTF MAYA YOU ARE BROKEN!"

JohnnySix

Trying to weld vertices on two boxes without first deleting the polygon on each face between them and thinking Max is broken.