Viewport Annoyances
polycounter lvl 11
2 Issues I get annoyed by in Max, and always just deal with. Someone, please save my hairline...
Issue #1; I'm modeling from reference planes. I'm behind a plane, backface culling makes the plane invisible, until I'm close enough to the backside that it still shows up as solid black, and I can't see the thing I'm zooming on. It seems like it's something to do with the camera thinking i've zoomed in front of the object, and so it draws it, but the direction is from behind the light source, so it's just drawn as black. Is there a way to fix this? I normally close out sub-object mode, select all, hide unselected (They're frozen), then go back into sub-object. Lame.
Issue #2; I'm in Perspective view, working in 1m scale. When I zoom in too far (sub-meter, for detail work), I seem to hit the camera's threshold. At that point, I need to switch to User view, but this means that backfacing gets fuzzy, my edges get all weird, and I can't see object intersections as easily; they all get fuzzy, not as clear as in Perspective. I usually end up toggling a lot when I'm in this size range, and it just gets silly. Is there a way to tweak my views so that this doesn't come up anymore?
Issue #1; I'm modeling from reference planes. I'm behind a plane, backface culling makes the plane invisible, until I'm close enough to the backside that it still shows up as solid black, and I can't see the thing I'm zooming on. It seems like it's something to do with the camera thinking i've zoomed in front of the object, and so it draws it, but the direction is from behind the light source, so it's just drawn as black. Is there a way to fix this? I normally close out sub-object mode, select all, hide unselected (They're frozen), then go back into sub-object. Lame.
Issue #2; I'm in Perspective view, working in 1m scale. When I zoom in too far (sub-meter, for detail work), I seem to hit the camera's threshold. At that point, I need to switch to User view, but this means that backfacing gets fuzzy, my edges get all weird, and I can't see object intersections as easily; they all get fuzzy, not as clear as in Perspective. I usually end up toggling a lot when I'm in this size range, and it just gets silly. Is there a way to tweak my views so that this doesn't come up anymore?
Replies
It might also help to work at a different scale, then resize your object and reset the scale before exporting.
I tried working at a different scale, then having the exporter transform it for me. It got kind of confusing, so I skipped it. That was my fallback idea, but I haven't been annoyed enough by it lately to look into it.
What about the Backfacing on the planes? This seems to work better when trying the Viewport Clipping, but doesn't go away completely. Am I outta luck, or is there a "no, REALLY cull backfaces...." button somewhere I don't know about?
Yea I don't know about that one, never had that happen to me so I think it might be a video card driver issue, depending on the card you might want to check for more current drivers or try some older drivers if they're the latest and "greatest".
You can also try switching max to run in OpenGL or ... software mode and see if that makes a difference. Main Menu > Customize > Preferences > Viewport Tab > Choose Driver. Might need to "revert from Direct3D" if its set to it before software or OpenGL are available.
Thanks again!
I create a mesh, apply turbosmooth, turn Isoline on for ease-of-use. At some point I collapse the mesh without turning Isoline off and not my normals are all goofy from the 8 sided N-Gon's all over the place (Isoline removed lines, keeps vertices; collapses to near-garbage if you don't remove it). Is there a way to recover this, or tesselate it the way Turbosmooth had it before collapsing?
For the TSmooth Collapse Problem I have found only one single solution: Undo.