3ds Max 2011 Viewport Scale Reset

Fishspawn

I am working on a character in max 2011 and I had to scale it down a lot to fit the scale the designers of our game have been using in their engine. Now it is almost at the smallest scale possible in max, and it is near-impossible to work with as a result. Does anyone know of a way to reset the max viewport so that it doesn't act like it's at a super small scale or am I stuck with it being too tiny and none of my camera controls working properly? I've tried messing with the units and viewport clipping, but it still acts like the object is just too small. It wouldn't be a problem for a static mesh because I could work on it larger and shrink it down for export, but I need to animate in 3ds Max because I am using the Biped rig. If you know of a way to reset the scale of the viewport it would really help me out!

gsokol

Hm....Do you have any objects that are really, really, really far away? Even if its hidden or something it would make the scene as a whole larger. Also..are you at or near 0,0,0? If you are extremely far from the origin things can get funky.

See if that helps...those are the only things I can think of off the top of my head...

Oh...and what units are you working in?

Adam L. Gray

Changing the units setup will sometimes help. I think working in metric units can really screw up the near-clip sometimes.

For my latest contracts I've had to work with the metric units, where I usually scale the model up quite a lot, then scale it down once I'm done. If that's not possible however, haven't been a problem for me so far, but I'd try cloning the mesh as an instance, scale it up, and work with that one. Then all changes done on the scaled up copy will be transfered to the smaller one.

Just make sure you don't collapse the stack without re-cloning the small one, or they'll become different objects

Alternatively, keep the small one as a measurement, do whatever with the big one, then scale it down to fit the smaller one, measuring by eye or whatever to call it

/edit: eck, looks like I didn't read your whole post properly there, my bad. But see at least if the instance thing could work

Cheers

Fishspawn

Thanks for the ideas! I tried them but they don't seem to fix my problem.

I guess I should have specified a bit better - I am trying to animate at this point. That means I can't instance as the objects I need to work with are bones. I also can't just work larger and rescale without having to fix skin weights etc after resizing everything.

gsokol - no objects far away and I am working at 0,0,0. I am using meters as the system and file units, with the grid set to 1/meter.

Tiros - I tried the instance thing but that unfortunately doesn't work with bones. That would work If I was still modeling, but it is the animation that is causing problems. I also tried using other types of units but working at such a small scale is still problematic no matter what units I use.

I think Maya has some kind of viewport reset so that whatever scale you're at is the new "normal" scale. Is there no such feature in Max? I have been looking everywhere and I can't seem to find anything...