What the hell? (Max)

Acid_Wire

Just encountered something that seems to have swalled my last 30 mins or so of fiddling.. but oddly enough the problem persists even when I open backup versions of the file from my cloud storage.
Everything went wrong when I hit undo after making a mistake I do not remember. I can't exactly give a 'before' image, but here's the after:

Fwap

Did you use a Boolean at all? Try turning off your modifier stacks one at a time, to narrow it down.

Acid_Wire

No, I stay well away from booleans whenever at all possible (almost always). The most recent Edit Poly got rid of the screwyness, but also of course got rid of most of what I was working on (my fault for not breaking it up enough). What's weird is the fact that I opened up the backup on my Google Drive that was saved before this happened, but I encountered the exact same thing. Bizarre, and very frustrating.

Mark Dygert

It could be one of two things (or maybe more...).

1) You made some edits lower in the stack that affected the upper modifiers.
Everything in the modifier stack is dependant on what is lower, make changes to the foundation such as adding or removing geometry and things can get dicey up the stack. Every vert gets a number, if you add or remove geometry lower in the stack that numbering gets changed around, but the upper modifiers are still operating under the old vert numbering so vert 1 is now vert 3668 and gets moved 20 units instead of staying where it was at.

2) It went corrupt at some point, I've had that happen to me.
Something goes corrupt but you don't know it yet and even back ups that were saved at a time when you know it was "fine" are broken. I've had files where the snap shot is of the object that is broken and it looks fine, but you open the file and it's broken. These are the kinds of bugs that really screw people over, they don't crash max so it doesn't generate a bug report so the rarely hear about it.

spacefrog

Which version of Max are you using ?
Or it might help posting the file or open it on another Max workstation. Just in case something in your Max installation got wonky ...

Eric Chadwick

Collapse that motherf'n stack! Do this regularly. Reset Xform too, and collapse. Turn on backface culling, check for flipped normals, and check for other probs with a STL Check modifier.

Eric Chadwick

Yep, I've done crazy stacks like that. They break super easy though, you have to be uber-careful what you do.

s6

0_o I collapse everything always every time no matter what. Only thing i leave on the stack while working is TS. From time to time Symmetry, But i like to see the models raw state at all times.

That's a wicked stack though, And cool result. I feel like I'd waste more time setting that up than just hand positioning and welding instances though

Xzulian

Even though you already tried restarting max. I have sometimes have this problem when I walk away, or go to my desktop. Then I go back and it's like a lot of vertexes got extruded. Then I simply restart the program and it goes away. This looks like the same thing. But hey, some weird stuff happens so it might be a complete different problem. xd

Ace-Angel

The newer versions of Max are prone to Stack Corruption, 2011 and lower shouldn't have this problem unless you imported a mesh through an an already compiled model in an iffy format.

Other then that however, the newer versions do stack this issue pretty quickly.