You know why Max is -fucking- awesome?
polycounter lvl 20
And not just plain old awesome?
Because if your geometry ever starts to act screwy you can make a new box, attach that box to your screwy geometry, and all your problems are solved.
Seriously, what the hell is this shit?
Because if your geometry ever starts to act screwy you can make a new box, attach that box to your screwy geometry, and all your problems are solved.
Seriously, what the hell is this shit?
Replies
I think we have to live with these kind of things, it can't be helped
I'm not even going to read, I'm just going to post my guess:
Is it because it just crashed on me 14 fucking times for no apparent reason!? I mean, WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I EVER WANT TO SELECT VERTICIES!?
I swear the program is fucking BiPolar. sometimes it's happy and wants to do stuff with me, and other times, it goes in to a depressive rage, and refuses to come out of it's room except to yell at me. . .
You should try writing MAXScript. In fact, I'm starting a blog this weekend to document all the scripting 'nuances' people have. But the attach to box and reset XForms is a running joke the technical artists here have whenever anyone has any Max problems, it does fix like 90% of all issues. The other one that has helped in the last few releases is creating a new scene and merging in the old scene, that normally will get rid of any material issues attaching to a box doesn't fix.
I've noticed that Maya has had a lot of stuff that worked well and didn't need to be changed messed with by Autodesk and now it doesn't work well, usually just simple stuff or interface stuff...
Autodesk is the EA of 3D
not at all Adam loves boxes and thinks they are teh solution to life.
It will become self aware on August 4, 2013. . .
Just clean the damn max code autodesk! get rid of them altogether i say!!:poly128:
like X-dressers, X-sexuals, and X-atlantic-cable.
[felt I had to continue the sarcasm]
speaking of running jokes ...
please make sure you remove said teapot. On one game, our pipeline screwed up for ages ... everything's fine, they kept saying, everything's fine ... clutching at straws, i start file checking every exported model and discover one that's somewhat bigger than the others ... turned out there was a multi-thousand poly teapot with all it's faces hidden attached into a crucial part of one of the characters. Silly sod ..
(that, and the hidden Bionicle snowboarding demo that sat eating up all the cart space, only discovered 3 weeks before shipping after we'd optimised to fuck all around it. NEVER believe people when they tell you there's nothing wrong)
Yes the teapot works great
But there is same problem in Maya, right?
yup. Since more recent versions.
Technically its a long list of the atrocities that YOU'VE done to the box since it was born. Without TRANSFORM data you have no box, or no way of scaling, sizing or manipulating it. If you manage to mangle your box so bad that 3ds max has trouble understanding what it once was then they added a reset button for you.
As long as we're on the subject of of commonly worked around bugs...
How about RTT into an existing multi-sub object material. It likes overwrite other materials in the multi with the one you just baked. Relinking the textures, sets the paths for the other materials it overwrote to the same path. If I wanted all of the materials to be the same I wouldn't be using a multi-sub would I?
File > Asset Tracking (Shift-t) > Highlight the textures > Right Click > Set Path. Sometimes 3dsmax is dense and wants you to do it twice for some before it gets it right. Another annoying bug, but easily worked around.
Subscriber=subscriber + 1
Cleanse the material editor:
fn clear_all_materials =
(
for i = 1 to 24 do
(
meditMaterials = Standardmaterial ()
)
)
Cleanse the entire scene:
fn kill_materials =
(
max select all
$.material = undefined
)
seriously though, forget about the 3ds max object-level "mirror" function, it'll remove a major portion of your problems and scaling issues. use the mirror modifier instead.
also, whenever a maxscript performs an epic fail, you'll get weird artifacting with your model, like scaling not working properly, and the undo only taking effect after you've tried doing something in the scene.
if anyone else has a list of max tools that are poisonous, please list em.
oh, and then there's the perspective cutting bug, where the cut accuracy continually decreases until you can't cut your object anymore.
the inept "i'll add an extra vertex on top of this vertex here, just to fuck with you" when you try and get a nice snap to vertex, forcing me to c - 1 - ctrl+a - ctrl+w - v.
i should probably just make a macro out of that, if i could just get maxscript to fucking work properly.
Oh heres another one i love.
Your working in a stack. You have a few modifier's going because your adjusting something or UV mapping, ect. You go into your set camera to see what things are looking like from your camera angle. You hit the hot key to go back into perspective. Said object with a Modifier Stack explodes in and decides its going to screw itself.
Most of the time its noticeable and you just ctrl+Z it..sometimes its slight and you don't notice till it's far to late. *facepalm*
Actually that may not get rid of everything. Max stores materials in the scenematerials array, which is supposed to throw out unused materials, but it doesn't (especially with DX). To really get rid of everything, you'd probably use something like
for i = 1 to sceneMaterials.count do sceneMaterials = Standard_Material()
in addition to your meditmaterials.
BTW I just registered the domain last night, it will be www.unknown-system-exception.com . I'm trying to get Kees to write a function that will allow you blog in Max via email.
I can't tell you how happy this makes me feel.
I heard several people use the Attach to Box technique in Maya too. As ivars said, heh.
One thing that really is awesome about Max is the DirectX viewport. It's fast, reliable and I love it.
Besides, those save attempts more often than not corrupt part of the file. So I never use them, unless the autobak is hosed.
Your box can't fix that now can it???
I've merged the old scene into a new one, tried attaching boxes, teapots and Tyranosaurus Rexes, to no avail.
Anyone have anything else to try?
Isnt that the Badguy from Beastmaster?
I'm a Max user. I know how he feels.
I like how max's stack is freaking stupid. You do anything below edit mesh or poly or any of the selection modifiers and if you try to go up or down the stack the world ends. Making wanting to use the stack a bit pointless, similar to the history bs of the other software. Oh but the marcro recorder that doesn't record half the shit you do to try and automate shit. Nope can't record that. Nope , nope, nope. ah maybe... Yeah you can but it doesn't do what you want. Awesome macro recorder you are very much garbage 80% of the time. The same can be said for XSI recorder because it records commands in a way that can't be used for scripting so if you don't know how to script already you are screwed.
My favoriate is editable poly surface and how it doesn't let you weld things like you want. there are all these fucking hoops you have to jump. It's almost like asking a prepy girl out. Sometimes it says no but then it does when you don't want it to, or yes but it's a lie. I really wish they had updated editable mesh to have the useful tools theat epoly has instead of making a new tool that sucks balls 45 % of time. Oh here we go, it's edge turinging time, no shortcut. Weld, what's that, do you mean like weld weld, weld or like weld, I can't weld cause those verts are special. Remove, you can't mean all those edges, I'll leave one behind because I know better. Cap hole, yeah I'll cap those open edges just the way you like it and I'll even leave gift, the kind that keeps on giving But my favorite is how every freaking path needs to be on the c drive. maps, autosave, etc. Thank you Autodesk for kissing Microsuck butt and screwing us with garbage on mor time.... Cause I really want shit on my c drive when I installed you stupid program on another drive... I swear Apple, Autodesk, Microsuck and Adobe get together every few months to figure out how they can screw with their customers just enough to really piss them off. It must take talent. I mean they figure out how make all these "cool features" and also make them incredible useless half the time you need to use them.
It's extremely powerful but there are obviously a few things it can't guess. Like if you select an edge in editpoly, chanfer it, and extrude the resulting face with an extrude modifier on top, then go back to edit poly and change the bevel into something else, that wont work.
However : create a one sided polygon 'hull'. Add a editpoly modifer on that. In that 'extra' edit poly, select the corner verts and chanfer them. Then add a shell modifier on top, and a turbosmooth.
Now go back way down your stack and move the verts of the hull as desired. The sharp corners, shell thickness and smoothing will remain and follow your edits.
NOICE!
In XSI, you can turn off the history be going into immediate mode. It's the button called "Immed" at the bottom of the right panel. There is also the option of freezing the history periodically by hitting freeze right next to the Immed button.
Alex
guess someone cant take a little bit sarcasm o_o
The thing I like about Max is that one can still work 'stack free' by simply not piling up modifers and staying inside the basic edit poly mode - no need to turn stacking off for that (don't think such thing is possible in Max anyway?)
But in Maya for instance, if you turn history off (which is the only way to go 'stack free' in that app) it sure keeps the modeling static (no history buildup for the hundreds of cuts, bevels aso that modelers perform every 10 seconds) but it also forces you to loose all the dynamic stuff you might want *on top* of that first layer of polygons :extrudes, path lofts aso. But such things need to be kept editable at all times when working highpoly.
example : if you extrude a profile along a rail you want to be able to go back in order to edit the source spline and see the update in realtime - but if you have history off you'll have to either edit all cross sections, or, delete the rail, edit the source profile, and regenerate the rail...
Anyways. Stack is cool. Thanks max for being the (only?) program with something this powerful!
But it's true that for lowpoly modeling and a good part of highpoly modeling a stack is not always necessary. However it is truly a time saver when working with symmetrical meshes tilted in space (dynamic edit on both sides through the symmetry modifier), objects with thickness, and many other things.
By the way, it's funny how Maya integrated some sort of realtime 'reflection' stuff but it only works on a mesh *already* welded down the middle, and only supports moving/sclaing/rotation of components but no actual topology edit. Talk about a useless toy haha.
(Am I turning into some sort of Macintosh/Ipod/fag-fanboy equivalent, shifting focus of threads just to for the sake of beating dead horses?)
So yeah all these apps suck big time. Today Max2008 refused to load a perfectly fine OBJ. And it the turbosmooth display is still from last century.
Couldn't we setup Wishlist threads more of the major apps? That might grab attention.
Apparently, every frame you scrub through, counts as an Undo. So, if you tweak the angle of a bone, and then scrub through the animation, then hit undo, it goes back one frame. Hit undo again? Another frame. . . 1, 200 frame animation, scrubbed through, and you will have lost ALL of your undos.
Max stack is way nicer though than any history type I have encountered, mostly because you don't have to dig through shit to reach it and it's easy, plus it feels like I have complete control over it. I say feel because it more an illusion than anything else in my case... LOL I have had instance where I make a quad and add modifiers to it then try and edit and it screws up, so sometimes it works and usually for I want to do it seems it doens't. In your example if you went later and started to extrude things would it still work?
Basically the lowest stack level (editpoly, spline, aso) is where you put the overall information that 'drives' the shape ; whatever you stack up next is more like parametric operations you perform on top of it. So if the purpose of your extrude is to define an eye socket, i'd say do it within editpoly, with nothing on top. However if you want to extrude a horn growing from a forehead according to a spline profile, I'd say do that with a modifier between your base editpoly and whatever you have on top.
Also! Note that you can copy-paste modifiers! So if these copied-pasted modifiers are global (not performed at a vertex/edge/face lever) you can pass them from one object to the other easily. That wins :P
When editing the UV map on a model being able to edit UVs ABOVE the skin modifier, and then pull that modifier back down under the skin modifier is great. ell, it makes my job easier.
As Pior mentions, you can copy and paste modifiers, which is also useful for skinning, especially when you want to change the base pose of a model - it works a TINY BIT like the Zbrush transpose.