Back when was first learning to model created the Big Ben clock tower with most of the major details all as one piece, and not even using symmetry.
I dont think thats a mistake PolyHertz. Unless you were creating a texture for it in Zbrush, it is kind of common use to create many static meshes entirely (with no symmetry on) and than delete half of its faces to apply the symmetry. (duplicating from right side to the left in -x,-y,-z)
If it was a face, Than it would've been complete different story.
My mistake, becoming a PC forum flooder and answered questions based on my assumptions not research.
upgrade from 4gb of RAM to 8gb so max wouldn't have memory crashes all the time. Learnt shortly after that 32-bit operating systems are capped at 4gb. Lame.
Spacebar in 3dsMax is the worst. I used to just think that max was soft crashed and I would exit and restart the program.
My biggest D'oh...I still do to this day.
Starting work on a new section of a model that is based off an old section, and accidentally using 'instance' instead of clone....then working with the original mesh hidden for over an hour..saving periodically...beyond autobacks grasp, and finding out that I just effed up the original mesh with no way to recover...ughhhhh.
I once entered a knife into a gun modeling contest.
That was a mistake.
Don't bring a knife to a gunfight? :P
I remember a few years ago after practically pulling an all nighter to get an assignment done, then having to wash my car the next day and thinking it would be easier just to wash half the car and apply a symmetry modifier. I guess 3D was still on my mind, luckily the thought only lasted a second otherwise it would have been really embarrassing.
I remember a few years ago after practically pulling an all nighter to get an assignment done, then having to wash my car the next day and thinking it would be easier just to wash half the car and apply a symmetry modifier. I guess 3D was still on my mind, luckily the thought only lasted a second otherwise it would have been really embarrassing.
During my exams I kept trying to CTRL+Z what i had written wrong and then realising how stupid that was.
I saw a couple people complaining about the space bar in max, at first i was like "Huh, it's that bad? I don't even know what it does" so i loaded up max. I pressed space with something selected and straight away I said out loud, "fucking THAT"
I always thought that max was locked up and restarted every time. God damn that's an eye opener, thanks.
I also obsessively save. I have sudden surges of ctrl+s spam right before I'm about to totally dive into some shit that could go downhill, like I'm about to bake a ton of objects, i'll save, open render to texture, save, select an object, save, literally just pan the viewport a bit, save, etc. Anything that alters the file so that it becomes savable again.
It's quite odd actually, sometimes it works out pretty bad and even my backups get corrupted.
Also:
I only started using the Layers tool in max a couple months ago, god that is a life saver, don't know why i didn't use it before.
I used to chamfer edges then meshsmooth when I made hard surface high poly models. Then spent ages cleaning the mesh when the corners always screwed up.
To this day I still compulsively save every few minutes or before doing anything that could even remotely crash or stuff up. To compound this I have incremental save turned on so I end up with several hundred iterations by the time I'm done.
..I did all of them I think...haha
here's mine....thinking that I could model anything just using by using adobe illustrator, and exporting vectors to max, then extruding faces...model done!
hitting space bar by mistake when coming from maya to max shouldn't really cause many problems - it only switches the lock on 33% of the time anyway.
working on massive files with very little memory, i learned the hard way about hitting hold before hitting save. Now, even though i haven't had a "max has run out of memory and will close" message whilst saving and trashing the file for ages, i still hit 'hold' out of habit. The logic being - if it crashes on hold, you haven't lost anything other than the unsaved work. If it holds fine and then crashes on save, you can just fetch.
btw - you'd be amazed at the amount of people who don't know about maxback.bak ... i often wait until someone's finished smashing their head into the edge of their desk before telling them, depending on if i like them or not
I also obsessively save. I have sudden surges of ctrl+s spam right before I'm about to totally dive into some shit that could go downhill, like I'm about to bake a ton of objects, i'll save, open render to texture, save, select an object, save, literally just pan the viewport a bit, save, etc. Anything that alters the file so that it becomes savable again.
Hehe, I had a habit of that as well, which isn't that smart when you have activated Increment Saves. Did that in XSI and suddenly ran out of harddisk space
Reading wrong on an art test i did, i did read "max 500 triangles" while it actulay said "max 5000 triangles" noticed right after i did send it to them, truth to be told i never got an answer, surprisingly enough :P
on one of my first unwraps ever back when i was learning 3d, I had a bunch of faces left that I could not locate on my model. so instead of taking the time to really look for them I just grabbed all those faces, scaled them down until they were the size of a pixel and shoved them in the corner of my uv space. problem solved!
Thinking that randomly extruding faces from a cube to roughly get the shape of some spikey alien ship, then applying a lambert with 0.6 translucent and tinted red was the coolest thing ever.
Being satisfied with something like this (modeled by me long time ago) and not searching for new and better ways to improve my work flow. That's really hard i think: when you got a level where your skills are "OK" to push yourself to get better and faster...because the "OK"-skills mostly are enough to create most of stuff you want - if you are lazy, you will satisfied with that
Being satisfied with something like this (modeled by me long time ago) and not searching for new and better ways to improve my work flow. That's really hard i think: when you got a level where your skills are "OK" to push yourself to get better and faster...because the "OK"-skills mostly are enough to create most of stuff you want - if you are lazy, you will satisfied with that
I know what you're saying, when you're just starting out it's hard to say wow I'm really proud of this,but it really sucks and i need to get a million times better if I wanna do this for a living. The first part is easy that is, it's the 2nd part that's hard heh.
Another mistake/story of mine: for my first 3d model I had a front picture of a car and I literally just placed a ton of boxes everywhere so it filled the shape of the car completely. I posted it on a gta mod forum or something and after arguing about the greatness of my model I was banned. Lmao.
not backing stuff up on a separate disk while using a cheap and crappy HD. lost about 3 months worth of work.
oh and i wore away the "S" on my keyboard. its just a blank black key now.
Autoback has always been primary source of my misery. I've worked in archviz company for a while and max would always decide to do a backup of my scene when I was trying to attach 50000 objects together. Which led to crash
So I developed a habit of turning it off and doing incremental saves myself.
Relying on autoback from Max which is a life saver some times and then using Maya and forgetting Maya is dumb and doesn't have autoback and losing tons of work : /
I once left the computer after setting a scene up for baking (exploded, smooth meshes made 'real' etc), but worked off my originals. Came back later and thought "Oh, I should save whatever it was I was doi... oh fuck". Big pain when I needed to adjust the models later.
Not really a dumb mistake, but when I was green I'd planar map everything. Individual faces. Much stitching.
i was exploding my mesh for baking, and i had forgot to turn auto key on and move the slider to a different frame, so i saved over it and had to unexplode my mesh manually.
Replies
polycount..... iowa.... i think you are on a continual string of mistakes that leave your rear quarters sore and tender :P
I dont think thats a mistake PolyHertz. Unless you were creating a texture for it in Zbrush, it is kind of common use to create many static meshes entirely (with no symmetry on) and than delete half of its faces to apply the symmetry. (duplicating from right side to the left in -x,-y,-z)
If it was a face, Than it would've been complete different story.
My mistake, becoming a PC forum flooder and answered questions based on my assumptions not research.
X_X
hah, i did that too.
My biggest D'oh...I still do to this day.
Starting work on a new section of a model that is based off an old section, and accidentally using 'instance' instead of clone....then working with the original mesh hidden for over an hour..saving periodically...beyond autobacks grasp, and finding out that I just effed up the original mesh with no way to recover...ughhhhh.
That was a mistake.
Don't bring a knife to a gunfight? :P
I remember a few years ago after practically pulling an all nighter to get an assignment done, then having to wash my car the next day and thinking it would be easier just to wash half the car and apply a symmetry modifier. I guess 3D was still on my mind, luckily the thought only lasted a second otherwise it would have been really embarrassing.
During my exams I kept trying to CTRL+Z what i had written wrong and then realising how stupid that was.
Anyway, my personal favourite is ctrl-C for copy, and ending up with a freaking camera
Ah also not knowing for ages that ctrl-backspace in edge mode deletes the verts too. Oh the time I wasted....
I always thought that max was locked up and restarted every time. God damn that's an eye opener, thanks.
I also obsessively save. I have sudden surges of ctrl+s spam right before I'm about to totally dive into some shit that could go downhill, like I'm about to bake a ton of objects, i'll save, open render to texture, save, select an object, save, literally just pan the viewport a bit, save, etc. Anything that alters the file so that it becomes savable again.
It's quite odd actually, sometimes it works out pretty bad and even my backups get corrupted.
Also:
I only started using the Layers tool in max a couple months ago, god that is a life saver, don't know why i didn't use it before.
Change the space bar key.
Change autoback to 40 every 3 minutes.
Added a hot key to "select element" in the UV Editor.
The mistakes are everything that you cats had already said.
To this day I still compulsively save every few minutes or before doing anything that could even remotely crash or stuff up. To compound this I have incremental save turned on so I end up with several hundred iterations by the time I'm done.
here's mine....thinking that I could model anything just using by using adobe illustrator, and exporting vectors to max, then extruding faces...model done!
working on massive files with very little memory, i learned the hard way about hitting hold before hitting save. Now, even though i haven't had a "max has run out of memory and will close" message whilst saving and trashing the file for ages, i still hit 'hold' out of habit. The logic being - if it crashes on hold, you haven't lost anything other than the unsaved work. If it holds fine and then crashes on save, you can just fetch.
btw - you'd be amazed at the amount of people who don't know about maxback.bak ... i often wait until someone's finished smashing their head into the edge of their desk before telling them, depending on if i like them or not
Huh? do tell?
Hehe, I had a habit of that as well, which isn't that smart when you have activated Increment Saves. Did that in XSI and suddenly ran out of harddisk space
Oh right, thats what I do - I just thought a had a completely wrong workflow.
Thanks for clearing up.
I know what you're saying, when you're just starting out it's hard to say wow I'm really proud of this,but it really sucks and i need to get a million times better if I wanna do this for a living. The first part is easy that is, it's the 2nd part that's hard heh.
Another mistake/story of mine: for my first 3d model I had a front picture of a car and I literally just placed a ton of boxes everywhere so it filled the shape of the car completely. I posted it on a gta mod forum or something and after arguing about the greatness of my model I was banned. Lmao.
If you have textools installed you can assign a hotkey to "extend selection"
oh and i wore away the "S" on my keyboard. its just a blank black key now.
optimizing a model because of a high tricount and later on realizing there was a copy of the model hidden so the tricount was doubled the entire time
Using XSI are we?
nah, 3ds max, and ctrl+s every 5 seconds.
So I developed a habit of turning it off and doing incremental saves myself.
Not really a dumb mistake, but when I was green I'd planar map everything. Individual faces. Much stitching.
Hehe, I was just guessing XSI because you use S for navigation as well, something I had a hard time adjusting to when moving to 3ds max.