I have an object at 23.482, 91.954, 37.294, I then go to the transform tool, and type in 25, 90, 40. Max looks at that and says: 25.001, 89.999, 39.999. That's close enough right?
Well, yes, max, but WHY would you not just put it where the fuck I told you to put it instead!?
Anyone know how to make max understand?
yes, this is hugely annoying, i haven't found a way around it yet
The one that always gets me is when i hit P while i'm in the Material Editor. I want to switch to Perspective and it brings up the Creat Material Preview.... which if your like me alwasy on dual monitor with the mateiral editor on the second screen it can really be annoying
I also hate how typing in skin weights recalculates the other weights almost as much as it guessing to move it "close enough". At least lie to me and say you move it where I wanted I probably won't care if its off by .000001 by don't tell me about it... The only way I've managed to get around it a few times, (read not very often) is to center the object and the objects pivot to world zero and then move the object where I want it.
yes, this is hugely annoying, i haven't found a way around it yet
Would that be based on part of the system unit scale and the distance from the orgin accuracy?
And Vig, I know you told me at the meet, but damn. I blanked out when I got home finding it. I need to "reset" the keyboard shortcuts. Somehow I have turned off the ability to exit subobject mode by pressing 1-5 again.
Yep, at work we use ft and that happens pretty often. At home I use standard 3dsmax units and it rarely happens. Of course I use 3ds more at work... but I'd be willing to bet 3ds likes its native units.
<-That's the devils button right there...
Keyboard Shortcut Override, you'll find it in the top menu as a button. Most of the time you'll want it off. Except for the few times you actually want the sub-menu shortcuts to override the main max shortcuts.
For example:
- Ctrl-S with KSO off, saves if your in or out of sub-object mode (Vert, Edge, Poly, Element)
- Ctrl-S with KSO on, toggles soft select.
On a side note I suggest binding Ctrl-Shift-S to Save As, that way you can click the plus next to the file name and save an iteration instead of overwriting the same file. Put your eggs in separate baskets bla bla bla...
Now there was a bug a while back where you could toggle KSO on and the button wouldn't update. So even if its up, toggle it on then off.
Mlichy said, it gets in the way so much he created a separate shortcut just for KSO which is normally unbound. I got around it by taking Pers advice and gutted the 3ds keyboard shortcuts and rebuilt it with just what I used. But that also has its problems, some shortcuts are hard coded and can't be changed =/ I suggest backing up the original layout first before experimenting.
On a side note I suggest binding Ctrl-Shift-S to Save As, that way you can click the plus next to the file name and save an iteration instead of overwriting the same file.
Save yourself from seeing the popup and the clicking of the + by binding "Save Incremantal (+)" to ctrl-shift-S instead
/facepalm That's much better advice. I like you're thinkin'
A while back I wrote a script that when I ctrl-shift-s it brings up a menu with 3 options:
Save +1
Save +1 and Archive locally
Save +1, Archive and check into the server
It also does some file checking and cleans up the material editor before archiving but its pretty simple, just about anyone could write it.
Keyboard Shortcut Override, you'll find it in the top menu as a button. Most of the time you'll want it off. Except for the few times you actually want the sub-menu shortcuts to override the main max shortcuts. .
Damn Vig, it was right in front of my face.. Thanks.
..
With snapping, I have noticed that if your objects too small for the provided system measurements, it can be off. So it will snap slightly off to what your attempting. I have to make the objects oversize, and shrink them as the last step to overcome this.
This annoys me, why is it that when you make adjustments to the settings in the uvw unwrap editor window it never saves those settings, it's very annoying, I lost 30 mins today because of that.
We used Max 9 for a long time here, and I never ran into this until we upgraded to 2009. I have an object, I'm not in sub-object mode, nor is anything selected in sub-object mode. I do a UVW Unwrap, go to UV vertex mode, tweak some points, but nothing updates. I click over to poly mode, and suddenly it updates with my previous changes. However, if I collapse before going to poly mode, I lose any work I just did in the UV editor. Doesn't happen 100%, but often enough to be annoying.
i cleaned up my tool bar, but now i want to clean up my command panel, how can i say.. remove the paint deformation / subdivision dispacement rollouts in my edit polly menu?
i cleaned up my tool bar, but now i want to clean up my command panel, how can i say.. remove the paint deformation / subdivision dispacement rollouts in my edit polly menu?
Yeah that would be great. Tried to find a way but couldn`t. Even if possibe I`m afraid it would require some coding ??
That would take some pretty deep cuts. I'm afraid if you cut max that deep it would bleed to death.
BUT you could, create a new scripted UI that has just the features you need arranged the way you want them. You could start the whole thing off by using the WYSIWYG UI maker in 3dsmax and looking up the commands in the maxscript help or watching the listener window when you do a specific action.
I'm all over this thread tomorrow. Can't wait to get rid of most of maxes ui. Expertmode is already much more usable for me cos I float most of my toolbars across onto the second monitor.
I love this thread too. The most frustrating part about learning a new piece of software isn't the big tasks that you can find a tutorial or help topic on, but the little nitpicky things that other users can answer in 2 seconds for you. Thanks for helping out guys!
Is there any way to collapse the stack without breaking instancing? If I have a scene with a bunch of instanced objects, and I need to move back and forth doing a little uv tweak, then a little geo tweak, then back to uvs etc for final stage tuning, my stack gets a bit large and starts to scare me (should I be scared? I'm used to maya's corruption-prone construction history) but I can't collapse it without breaking all the nice instancing. How should I be approaching this?
Okay one more: when I'm snapping something, I can click an axis to have it only snap along that axis (like maya). This seems to be 'sticky' though. If I've been snapping in only one axis (say x) for a while, but then I want to move to my perspective view and start snapping in three axis, how do I go about doing that?
I'm not really sure what you mean by snap along axis?
You mean when you click the gizmo axis, then lock the selection and now you can click anywhere to move on that axis? Then the answer is just click on some other axis, or the center of the gizmo, but I'm not sure that's what you meant
Sorry for the explanation. Yes that's what I meant. I can't seem to find a place on the gizmo that highlights all 3 axis however, I can only get either single axis or any combination of 2.
Toward center most point will highlight all three, in the middle on two it will highlight a band connecting the two, and you already know clicking on a post does. Just need to move more toward the point where they all converge.
Okay after a lot of playing around, it seems max will always let you snap in 3 dimensions as long as 'use axis constraints' isn't set in the snap options (right-click on snap icon). With use axis constraints on, I get the snapping along a single axis behavior I'd expect.
Now I'm trying to reproduce a behavior I got accidently once or twice: rotating an object around a vertex, instead of around the object's pivot (which is usually at the center of the object). An example of this would be rotating a window around its top-left corner after snapping it into position to make the next side of a building. Some combination of clicking on the point, with snapping on and the rotate tool active seemed to make this happen a couple times for me, but I can't reproduce the effect now and the help is useless on this. Ideas?
Its called orbit subobject, you can find it in the help files
Ah sorry, I guess I'm being unclear. I'm talking about rotating the object in space but pivoting on one of its vertices not its object pivot, not orbiting my camera around the object.
Oops my fault you did say roating the object silly me. here are two ways to do it:
I.
Move to pivot to the vertex position and rotate around that.
step1: pivot is in the center at default so need to move it first
st2: It`s easier if you set the snap options higher
st3: move the pivot point into position and rotate the object (dont forget to uncheck Afect Pivot Only first!)
After that it may be useful to set the pivot back to its original position (center to object)
II.
you can also try this script from Neil Blevins, called putpivot
Nope, you're over complicating it. On the top button bar, there is a button, to select what type of pivot you want to use.
The drop down on the left of this image:
It's usually set to the second one on the list. This makes your object rotate around it's set pivot point, no matter what. Instead, select the 3rd one "Use Selection Center"
Now switch on snapping (to vertex if that's what you want to rotate around), and when your mouse shows the little snap over the vertex you want to rotate around, click and drag.
This will still limit you to whatever axis you had last selected, so if it's not right, just go to the gizmo and click the right one, then go back and try again on the vertex.
Trying to find whatever there is to make working with max nicer, i tried changing the background image to this corner gradient thing, so my viewport is not a flat gray plane. It's a small thing but it's a lot easier on the eyes i think!
As far as I know it won't really affect the performance in max much at all.
and heres the image im using:
just add it to views->viewport background and set it to stretch with the viewport.
Cool idea, I like it. I animate with the viewport background so I can't use it as much, but I might add it to my maxstart.max file so its there by default until I replace it.
You can also set it to be the environment background and turn on use environment background instead of having to load it into every viewport. With it set this way it will also render.
Also the shortcut for viewport background is Alt+B.
GAH! Anyone else have an issue in Max 2009 (or maybe other versions?) where if you hit Z to center on an object, or sub object, you can rotate around it fine, but if you hit Z, and then zoom (scroll wheel) then try to rotate around the object, your rotational pivot is offset to some random location?
It's driving me batty! I'm fairly sure this didn't happen to me in Max 9? But I could be smoking something.
Make sure you are selecting arc rotate sub object at the very bottom right? select it, and once set, it stays this way all the time. Just guessing I could be totally wrong =/
Since my annoyances ended up birthing this wonderfully positive thread, let's give that a second go!
This chapter's called Inconsistencies:
you can't focus on (or indeed orbit selected) a sub-object selection in all modifiers, despite these modifiers having the very same sub-objects as Edit Poly does. A few examples:
-Projection
-VertexPaint
Also, there's no loop or ring-select in these, making tweaking your cage or painting vertices an unnecesary hassle.
Is there something that could make this more pleasant, such as a global loop/ring selection or something that will make (at the very least) orbit sub-object recognise what I have selected?
i toyed around with mental ray for texture baking - is there a way to filter the normal map output? (because complete & ambient occlusion maps are correctly filtered) yeah im aware that baking in higher image res & downsizing gets the job done..
I hear ya MP. When I tweak cages, I'll export it, tweak it using edit poly (not add/remove geo just push/pull) then import the cage again, kind of annoying but works.
As for the rotation issue that is annoying, try hitting "i" it will focus the screen on your mouse cursor and should give you something closer to what you're looking for. It's not perfect but might work in some cases?
Yeah, those are two good suggestion. Not perfect, as you say, but a definite improvement.
Speaking of texture baking, why do my normalmaps have black backgrounds, despite the background colour being a neutral blue? It's not a big problem, but given how shitty the bakes I get are at times (my fault entirely, not Max, I'm fairly sure ), it's an extra annoyance.
Along the same vein of problems: In the VertexPaint modifier, the Face and Element sub-objects are more useless than I thought. Selecting a face and ctrl-pressing verts (as this is the only subobject in which you can actually do something) doesn't actually convert the selection to vertices. It doesn't do anything, to be exact.
Yeah, those are two good suggestion. Not perfect, as you say, but a definite improvement.
Speaking of texture baking, why do my normalmaps have black backgrounds, despite the background colour being a neutral blue? It's not a big problem, but given how shitty the bakes I get are at times (my fault entirely, not Max, I'm fairly sure ), it's an extra annoyance.
Along the same vein of problems: In the VertexPaint modifier, the Face and Element sub-objects are more useless than I thought. Selecting a face and ctrl-pressing verts (as this is the only subobject in which you can actually do something) doesn't actually convert the selection to vertices. It doesn't do anything, to be exact.
hmm.. you have the "padding" thing up there on the top, and you can set the ray miss check colour to a healthy 128 128 255. then just increase the padding so much that the black almost disappears. of course, thanks to max programmers brilliant awareness of the woes of artists, you'll have to do this shit every single time you want to render the damn normals.
Right, there's that, but I was just wondering why it ignores the perfectly good option (that it provides) for making the background a certain colour? Is this a bug, or something in my settings?
That is kind of weird and shouldn't do that, doesn't help much to know that it doesn't do that on my version 2009 =/
Are you looking at the actual file it saves or at the render preview window that pops up? Whats in the render preview window is always off and is probably displaying the environment background color( KB shortcut 8 ) which is default set to black, instead of the actual element color RTT is set to use?
If the actual file is off, you've got a weird problem on your hands, maybe try setting the env background color to R128 G128 B255 and see what you get?
Are you saving to png with an alpha channel? Try TGA without alpha (24bit) and see what you get?
It comes up that way in photoshop? The reason I ask is that XNview will show the image with a black background if there's a alpha channel, (Ctrl-H toggles the alpha transparency preview).
Also its probably easier to just turn off miss ray check and let the background color show through once its properly sorted out. That way if you need to use it for what its meant to do, (find rays that go missing) its set to a easy to find color.
I've got an issue with max 2009, where, when wireframes are turned on (F4) the wireframe flickers in and out from the color it should be (white for selected, object color for unselected) to some other color (right now, grey (not object color)). Changing the object's color doesn't affect the color of the wireframe at all.
In addition, despite having "Shade Selected Faces" selected in the perspective window's properties, selected faces are simply highlighted in red.
lastly, backface culling seems to flicker on and off depending on view angle. . .
This seems to be constrained to a certain file (and versions saved off) So is it a setting some place that I'm missing?
how to bind peris's script to a button? i don't use maxscript quite often but as far as i can remember i only need to drag the script to an empty toolbar. but no!!
hmm strange, i just have it as bottomtoggle.ms in my macroscripts directory, and used customise use interface to bind it to F5. Dont know why dragging to an empty toolbar wont work
Replies
yes, this is hugely annoying, i haven't found a way around it yet
I also hate how typing in skin weights recalculates the other weights almost as much as it guessing to move it "close enough". At least lie to me and say you move it where I wanted I probably won't care if its off by .000001 by don't tell me about it... The only way I've managed to get around it a few times, (read not very often) is to center the object and the objects pivot to world zero and then move the object where I want it.
I wrote a script to center the object and the pivot.
http://www.vigville.com/forum_images/3dsmax/Scripts/VigTools_ToWorldZero.ms
Would that be based on part of the system unit scale and the distance from the orgin accuracy?
And Vig, I know you told me at the meet, but damn. I blanked out when I got home finding it. I need to "reset" the keyboard shortcuts. Somehow I have turned off the ability to exit subobject mode by pressing 1-5 again.
Keyboard Shortcut Override, you'll find it in the top menu as a button. Most of the time you'll want it off. Except for the few times you actually want the sub-menu shortcuts to override the main max shortcuts.
For example:
- Ctrl-S with KSO off, saves if your in or out of sub-object mode (Vert, Edge, Poly, Element)
- Ctrl-S with KSO on, toggles soft select.
On a side note I suggest binding Ctrl-Shift-S to Save As, that way you can click the plus next to the file name and save an iteration instead of overwriting the same file. Put your eggs in separate baskets bla bla bla...
Now there was a bug a while back where you could toggle KSO on and the button wouldn't update. So even if its up, toggle it on then off.
Mlichy said, it gets in the way so much he created a separate shortcut just for KSO which is normally unbound. I got around it by taking Pers advice and gutted the 3ds keyboard shortcuts and rebuilt it with just what I used. But that also has its problems, some shortcuts are hard coded and can't be changed =/ I suggest backing up the original layout first before experimenting.
Save yourself from seeing the popup and the clicking of the + by binding "Save Incremantal (+)" to ctrl-shift-S instead
ok.
A while back I wrote a script that when I ctrl-shift-s it brings up a menu with 3 options:
Save +1
Save +1 and Archive locally
Save +1, Archive and check into the server
It also does some file checking and cleans up the material editor before archiving but its pretty simple, just about anyone could write it.
Damn Vig, it was right in front of my face.. Thanks.
..
With snapping, I have noticed that if your objects too small for the provided system measurements, it can be off. So it will snap slightly off to what your attempting. I have to make the objects oversize, and shrink them as the last step to overcome this.
We used Max 9 for a long time here, and I never ran into this until we upgraded to 2009. I have an object, I'm not in sub-object mode, nor is anything selected in sub-object mode. I do a UVW Unwrap, go to UV vertex mode, tweak some points, but nothing updates. I click over to poly mode, and suddenly it updates with my previous changes. However, if I collapse before going to poly mode, I lose any work I just did in the UV editor. Doesn't happen 100%, but often enough to be annoying.
You and me both.
Also, this thread is awesome.
Yeah that would be great. Tried to find a way but couldn`t. Even if possibe I`m afraid it would require some coding ??
BUT you could, create a new scripted UI that has just the features you need arranged the way you want them. You could start the whole thing off by using the WYSIWYG UI maker in 3dsmax and looking up the commands in the maxscript help or watching the listener window when you do a specific action.
MaxScript > New Script > Tools > New Rollout.
Basically do your own custom version of Shannon Dees QuickTools.
http://www.anonymousempire.com/shannon/tools.htm
Is there any way to collapse the stack without breaking instancing? If I have a scene with a bunch of instanced objects, and I need to move back and forth doing a little uv tweak, then a little geo tweak, then back to uvs etc for final stage tuning, my stack gets a bit large and starts to scare me (should I be scared? I'm used to maya's corruption-prone construction history) but I can't collapse it without breaking all the nice instancing. How should I be approaching this?
Thanks.
Okay one more: when I'm snapping something, I can click an axis to have it only snap along that axis (like maya). This seems to be 'sticky' though. If I've been snapping in only one axis (say x) for a while, but then I want to move to my perspective view and start snapping in three axis, how do I go about doing that?
Now I'm trying to reproduce a behavior I got accidently once or twice: rotating an object around a vertex, instead of around the object's pivot (which is usually at the center of the object). An example of this would be rotating a window around its top-left corner after snapping it into position to make the next side of a building. Some combination of clicking on the point, with snapping on and the rotate tool active seemed to make this happen a couple times for me, but I can't reproduce the effect now and the help is useless on this. Ideas?
I.
Move to pivot to the vertex position and rotate around that.
step1: pivot is in the center at default so need to move it first
st2: It`s easier if you set the snap options higher
st3: move the pivot point into position and rotate the object (dont forget to uncheck Afect Pivot Only first!)
After that it may be useful to set the pivot back to its original position (center to object)
II.
you can also try this script from Neil Blevins, called putpivot
http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm
The drop down on the left of this image:
It's usually set to the second one on the list. This makes your object rotate around it's set pivot point, no matter what. Instead, select the 3rd one "Use Selection Center"
Now switch on snapping (to vertex if that's what you want to rotate around), and when your mouse shows the little snap over the vertex you want to rotate around, click and drag.
This will still limit you to whatever axis you had last selected, so if it's not right, just go to the gizmo and click the right one, then go back and try again on the vertex.
Trying to find whatever there is to make working with max nicer, i tried changing the background image to this corner gradient thing, so my viewport is not a flat gray plane. It's a small thing but it's a lot easier on the eyes i think!
As far as I know it won't really affect the performance in max much at all.
and heres the image im using:
just add it to views->viewport background and set it to stretch with the viewport.
You can also set it to be the environment background and turn on use environment background instead of having to load it into every viewport. With it set this way it will also render.
Also the shortcut for viewport background is Alt+B.
It's driving me batty! I'm fairly sure this didn't happen to me in Max 9? But I could be smoking something.
Seems to be more drastic the closer I am (i.e. a smaller object will have a bigger distortion or whatever)
Indeed, it was set to "Orbit" rather than "Orbit sub-object"
Thanks!
This chapter's called Inconsistencies:
you can't focus on (or indeed orbit selected) a sub-object selection in all modifiers, despite these modifiers having the very same sub-objects as Edit Poly does. A few examples:
-Projection
-VertexPaint
Also, there's no loop or ring-select in these, making tweaking your cage or painting vertices an unnecesary hassle.
Is there something that could make this more pleasant, such as a global loop/ring selection or something that will make (at the very least) orbit sub-object recognise what I have selected?
i toyed around with mental ray for texture baking - is there a way to filter the normal map output? (because complete & ambient occlusion maps are correctly filtered) yeah im aware that baking in higher image res & downsizing gets the job done..
As for the rotation issue that is annoying, try hitting "i" it will focus the screen on your mouse cursor and should give you something closer to what you're looking for. It's not perfect but might work in some cases?
Speaking of texture baking, why do my normalmaps have black backgrounds, despite the background colour being a neutral blue? It's not a big problem, but given how shitty the bakes I get are at times (my fault entirely, not Max, I'm fairly sure
Along the same vein of problems: In the VertexPaint modifier, the Face and Element sub-objects are more useless than I thought. Selecting a face and ctrl-pressing verts (as this is the only subobject in which you can actually do something) doesn't actually convert the selection to vertices. It doesn't do anything, to be exact.
hmm.. you have the "padding" thing up there on the top, and you can set the ray miss check colour to a healthy 128 128 255. then just increase the padding so much that the black almost disappears. of course, thanks to max programmers brilliant awareness of the woes of artists, you'll have to do this shit every single time you want to render the damn normals.
Are you looking at the actual file it saves or at the render preview window that pops up? Whats in the render preview window is always off and is probably displaying the environment background color( KB shortcut 8 ) which is default set to black, instead of the actual element color RTT is set to use?
If the actual file is off, you've got a weird problem on your hands, maybe try setting the env background color to R128 G128 B255 and see what you get?
Are you saving to png with an alpha channel? Try TGA without alpha (24bit) and see what you get?
It comes up that way in photoshop? The reason I ask is that XNview will show the image with a black background if there's a alpha channel, (Ctrl-H toggles the alpha transparency preview).
Also its probably easier to just turn off miss ray check and let the background color show through once its properly sorted out. That way if you need to use it for what its meant to do, (find rays that go missing) its set to a easy to find color.
In addition, despite having "Shade Selected Faces" selected in the perspective window's properties, selected faces are simply highlighted in red.
lastly, backface culling seems to flicker on and off depending on view angle. . .
This seems to be constrained to a certain file (and versions saved off) So is it a setting some place that I'm missing?
Any ideas?