Max: What's happened to my grid? (its tiny!)

Dubious_Fellow

Hi, I got back to working on this old model when I noticed my scaling tool was acting weirdly. Previous experience led me to think that my model was either massive or microscopically small. I measured the model and the seat base is around 150cm (a little too big but not big enough to explain the problem).

I then focused on the grid -I eventually found it and have ringed it in the screen grab. Its tiny! When I measure it its around 131mm (?!). Whats going on here -I haven't ever touched the grid settings? 

zachagreg

Awww look how cute it is. Have you tried editing the settings to get it to a reasonable size? Right click the snaps toggle at the top and under the Home Grid tab change it so something that will show up. 

Make sure your units setup is in the proper units, opening a file you may have pressed the pop-up to adopt the files unit scale.
Units Setup can be found under Customize>Units Setup. It may have been set to MM instead of cm for some reason. Or meters.

Grid Spacing is space between lines, Major Lines is a different color line that shows up every Nth and Perspective View Extent is how many lines of your grid show up in perspective view mode.


As for why it changed, you may have opened up a very old max file that had some specific settings in it that carried over or the weird viewcube bug might have happened to you at some point and messed with your Max settings file. 

Dubious_Fellow

zachagreg said:

Thanks, mini grid is no more! And it seems to have fixed the scaling issue (the two must be linked?).

I did switch to mm a few months back (from cm, and prior to that from standard max units). I'm guessing that's what caused the problem? -anyway, thanks again and for the quick reply!

Dubious_Fellow

zachagreg said:

UPDATE: I switched from mm to cm and I was still getting weird measurements. I imported the chair into a clean project and it transpires that the chair is ****ing huge. The grid wasn't at fault. I'm in the process of re-scaling now.

Morales of the story: Don't use mm & if you import a ton of objects into a scene, make sure the base object is scaled correctly!

zachagreg

Awesome glad to hear it helped! Yea what probably happened was a mismatching in scale on import mixed with an adoption of a different unit scale causing huge geo and a tiny grid.

musashidan

Look at the bottom right of your screenshot - grid=1m. A dead giveaway that your chair is huge. Each grid spacing is 1 metre. You should save your synced unit and grid sizes into your maxstart.max file. One of the tips I gave in my 3DArtist issue 123 article was to make use of the Maxstart file. It's surprising how few Max users actually know about it.