Dumbest mistakes you've made in 3d?

xk0be · Aug 2010

The dumbest thing I've ever done was probably a few years ago modding for Oblivion. I deleted all the edges from like 5 models (swords, guns etc) and started bragging to everyone how I figured out how to make objects with only 1 poly. Thought I stumbled upon some super secret or somethin lmao.

Yours?

Lazerus Reborn · Aug 2010

Thought n-gons were the greatest discovery id made.
An mirrioring then welding a mesh together instead of using a symmertry modifier.

Sean VanGorder · Aug 2010

To this day, I accidentally hit X in 3ds Max and flip out when I can't find my transform gizmo.

Hoopla! · Aug 2010

lol, nice.

i think the biggest mistake i still make is jumping back and fourth from program to program, instead of mastering one.

MattLichy · Aug 2010

It's not so much a mistake, but the Constrain to Edge feature in Max ALWAYS bites me in the ass...

ZacD · Aug 2010

Smoothing/subdividing something 3 or more times just to see how "good" and smooth it looks.

JFletcher · Aug 2010

This isn't really related to anything 3d but it's pretty stupid none the less:

Spent £95 to 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.

Will probably get a 64-bit Windows 7 copy soon.

Also 'x' and 'o' were quite annoying when learning Max, I didn't realise what I pressed.

edit:

Oh I know, when i was first starting out i used to just select all edges and chamfer, without looking at the result close up.

premium · Aug 2010

ZacD wrote: »

Smoothing/subdividing something 3 or more times just to see how "good" and smooth it looks.

Ahahaha

..

To me... the dumbest thing was.. hmm.. I guess... hmm.. importing sculpting to make normalmaps.. that counts? doono

Ruz · Aug 2010

ramping up the meshsmooth to 8 by mistake and losing the work i have done because it craps the memory out

Moosey_G · Aug 2010

Thanks Sasochicken, the same thing was happening to me, glad I know how to fix it.

scaryhands · Aug 2010

premium wrote: »

Ahahaha ..

To me... the dumbest thing was.. hmm.. I guess... hmm.. importing sculpting to make normalmaps.. that counts? doono

agreed....HAHA

Silth · Aug 2010

not saving, can't tell you how much work i've done without saving and booooommmm..... computer crash lol

Saiainoshi · Aug 2010

Not having autoback turned on, moving animated UVW modifiers up and down the stack.. BOOM!

samgriffiths · Aug 2010

premium wrote: »

Ahahaha ..

To me... the dumbest thing was.. hmm.. I guess... hmm.. importing sculpting to make normalmaps.. that counts? doono

Wait a sec.. I'm not suppose to put a Zbrush model into 3ds max?.. How else can I bake it down?

I'm serious.. sorry.

MattQ86 · Aug 2010

When I first got into 3D I thought that procedural textures were better than traditional textures.

Also, about a year and half back I decided to learn how to get good clean topology that would be easy to animate and thus spent a lot of time trying to quad out everything and when I did use tris I would put them in the stupidest places like on character's hands.

xvampire · Aug 2010

i never use snap in my life until 5 month ago

Avanthera · Aug 2010

I would lock the normals on a model in maya accidentally only to realize that the face normals were flipped when I turned backface culling on. I would then reverse the normals, but that would only turn the whole model black in maya, and blindingly white in an engine.

I had a whole process of exporting to max using an obj without importing smoothing groups and then back into maya because I thought maya was broken, lol

Filbot · Aug 2010

SasoChicken wrote: »

For the longest time I'd get pissed off when my selection mode would randomly change from sqaure or circle to paint or one of the other selection methods in Max until I finally realized pressing the Q button multiple times after pressing it once cycles through the selection types.

Change the hotkey for Q to "Select Object" that should disable that cycling through of the selection types. Same for Scale, change R to "Select and Scale"

Customize > Customize User Interface... > Keyboard Tab

Lord McMutton · Aug 2010

Making stuff with metaballs and thinking that it was awesome.

xk0be · Aug 2010

samgriffiths wrote: »

Wait a sec.. I'm not suppose to put a Zbrush model into 3ds max?.. How else can I bake it down?

I'm serious.. sorry.

gotta import an optimized version. try decimation master.

Autocon · Aug 2010

Always when working in multiple apps at a time like Max, UDK, Photoshop, Maya, Zbrush I hit the wrong navigation keys a ton because each software package has to be a unique snowflake and all have different shit.

skankerzero · Aug 2010

Thinking I can spam ctrl-z in Max like I can in Photoshop.

SimonT · Aug 2010

When you come from Maya you hit "space" all the time (It's the hotbox in Maya). As i learned Max i blamed the fucking program because i couldn't select anything! (space: lock selection)

Entity · Aug 2010

deleting history and freezing transformations without any thought at all.

Emperors Teeth · Aug 2010

I saved over a one character with another yesterday cause they had the same version number... not 3D specific but still :poly127:

McGreed · Aug 2010

Work on an object for hours, without saving at least once, and then program crashes and no backup was made because it hadn't been saved once so was still Default scene....

Emil Mujanovic · Aug 2010

Using a 3D package thinking I can actually model something decent.

D-Robe · Aug 2010

Spending months frustrated in Blender because I didn't know where the Turntable/Trackball view rotation switch was.

Del · Aug 2010

~ Remembering. To. Save.

When will the gods give photoshop and zbrush a crash recovery function.

Noors · Aug 2010

I used to not overlap my uv coz i thought it would crash smthing at some point. So i had many repeated patterns on my textures ^^

xk0be · Aug 2010

I'm on the other end of the spectrum than you guys, I save so much it's actually a detriment to getting stuff done. I'll look at my model, save, *THINK* about what I need to do next, and then save when I'm done with my thought.

Farfarer · Aug 2010

- Working on some bullshit assignment for university where we had to model an entire castle and hillside in 100,000 tris in one seamless, watertight mesh. About half-way through, I mistakenly converted the entire model to tris and saved it. Took me a long time to get it back to nice neat quads.

- Destructive editing.

- Oh, and way back a the very start of my game art learning; not realising polycounts were measured in triangles rather than quads. Thought I'd done a right good job of the model for the polycount it had

- But really, the big daddy of all clusterfuck stupid mistakes - NOT BACKING UP MY 3D WORK FOR 5 YEARS. Always always have a copy of your work on at least two different devices.

JO420 · Aug 2010

I have a few from over the years

- Not knowing how to unwrap a model in the early days i took my low poly model,detached the pieces i wanted to flatten and texture,making a copy of the model and manually flattening it and then making a render for the layout. Then texturing it and then using the morph modifier to morph it back to the original shape. that was back in 1999

- Not saving

- using a jazz disc back in the day to back up my work,if you breathed on it incorrectly it would crash

wi_2 · Aug 2010

- Not knowing how to unwrap a model in the early days i took my low poly model,detached the pieces i wanted to flatten and texture,making a copy of the model and manually flattening it and then making a render for the layout. Then texturing it and then using the morph modifier to morph it back to the original shape. that was back in 1999

That is awesome

vofff · Aug 2010

I saved and replaced my failed file into my backup file.

Mark Dygert · Aug 2010

The ctrl-z spam in max for sure.

Working on a 32bit OS with 4gb of ram, not saving after adding a bunch of clips to motion mixer, then mixing down carelessly as if it wouldn't crash.

Upgrading to a newer version of max and forgetting to setup/import my keyboard shortcuts then wondering why the "defaults" aren't working... oh yea those are "custom".

Damn you spacebar... damn you right to hell... When I switched from Maya to Max it took a few days to figure out what was causing things to freeze. Since then Spacebar is bound to "Maximize viewport toggle"

Working off of a autoback file and forgetting to resave it. Then moving onto another scene where it promptly overwrites the autoback I was working in.
File > Load recent files: Oh... sh!t...

My favorite newbie mistake wasn't made by me but a mod team member back in the HL1 days.
Teammate: "Hey Vig can you check my map for leaks I can't seem to find it"
Me: "Yea no problem... (woa how could he miss that giant hole in the skybox you could drive a truck through that thing?)"
Me: "I plugged the giant hole in the sky and it compiles fine, here ya go"
Teammate: "Its leaking again can you look at it?"
Me: "Ok... the hole is back!?" "whats with the hole in the sky?"
Teammate: "That's so the helicopters can get in"
Me: "..."

zakhar2 · Aug 2010

I used to think booleans where the best thing ever. Like, i'd boolean entire models together

TheMadArtist · Aug 2010

JO420 wrote: »

- using a jazz disc back in the day to back up my work,if you breathed on it incorrectly it would crash

I think I just started twitching upon reading the words "jazz disk." Hated those fuckers.

Mark Dygert · Aug 2010

Ha... yea I remember Jazz and Zip Drives. I had to use those when I was doing "digital paste up" for MillerFreeman, using quark express on mac OS 7. We would ship them all over the country, they had a shelf life of about a week or two, with that kind of abuse.

Then came the mystical FTP servers... Skipped right over the CD-R revolution, but holy hell was the net slow back then.

Guriamo · Aug 2010

wi_2 wrote: »

- Not knowing how to unwrap a model in the early days i took my low poly model,detached the pieces i wanted to flatten and texture,making a copy of the model and manually flattening it and then making a render for the layout. Then texturing it and then using the morph modifier to morph it back to the original shape. that was back in 1999

That is awesome

lol yeah, exactly what I did when first started UV mapping :P around the same time even ...

MattLichy · Aug 2010

Yeah... the Undo spam in Max gets me too.... grrrrrr

Jesse Moody · Aug 2010

Modeling high poly stuff and collapsing the turbosmooth modifier down to the edit poly thus destroying any chances of fixing the mesh.

PatrickL · Aug 2010

Lazerus Reborn wrote: »

Thought n-gons were the greatest discovery id made.
An mirrioring then welding a mesh together instead of using a symmertry modifier.

SON OF A BI-

Nah, just kidding. But I did have that moment awhile back!

Y_M · Aug 2010

xk0be wrote: »

I'm on the other end of the spectrum than you guys, I save so much it's actually a detriment to getting stuff done. I'll look at my model, save, *THINK* about what I need to do next, and then save when I'm done with my thought.

I have always and still do this.

Except when I used blender, because some idiot decided to make ctrl+w save instead of ctrl+s, so I was constantly losing work through crashes.

ZacD · Aug 2010

I ctrl+s whenever I think "I'm happy how that turned out" or take a 2 second pause.

brandoom · Aug 2010

Getting into 3d game art becuase I thought it would help me pick up girls =\

konstruct · Aug 2010

creating super high detail max files on a computer that constantly bluescreens.,

HD corruption + important files = Fuck.

JO420 · Aug 2010

MRico · Aug 2010

This happens more often than not...

Using layers in max and creating a primitive while the current (check marked) layer is hidden.

"Where the fuck is my plane?!?!?"

piippo · Aug 2010

Thinking the first thing I should model should be a sports car. That didn't quite happen

Messing up the shortcuts when moving from modo to XSI to 3ds Max. It's not like I don't know them already, but my brain keeps lagging

ScudzAlmighty · Aug 2010

T-posing an HP model in Zbrush into a cool pose and saving over the original unposed file before creating and baking the LP.

Dumbest mistakes you've made in 3d?

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