Spacing Tool

[magicm]

Originally posted by leonec
If I click once on the spinner the number 0.003m comes up and a bunch of poles are on the spline but the are not evenly space it looks like they are following an adaptive formation.

I did a little test, and it looks like the scale of the spline affects the 'spacing' setting of the spacing tool... Couldn't replicate your problem though.. Maybe resetting the xform of the spline and the pole solves it?

[Chris Thomas]

Ive not used the spacing tool, but you could try the snapshot tool instead. To use this just animate one light pole along the spline, using a path animation. (i'm in work so some of the exact names escape me). make sure the pole is set to "follow direction" with the path so that it is always at 90 degs to it. Also make sure constant velocity is checked.
Then use the snapshot tool to snapshot the light pole as it moves along the path, you should get what you want.

[Maven]

I did try that, but this does the same thing, it does not place the poles at the same exact spacing. there are more at the curves.

magicm: I am not really sure I know what you are talking about.

[Chris Thomas]

make sure the light poles animation along the path is liner, otherwisw you will get some acceleration at the beginning and end of its movement. but, that being the case, with "follow" and "constant velocity" being checked in the path constraint you should get what your looing for..

[Maven]

That didn't seem to work either. but i did make a new spline and tried the spacing tool and it worked fine. so there mush be something wrong with this spline I am useing. But I just don't know what it could be.

[Chris Thomas]

odd

[magicm]

Originally posted by leonec
magicm: I am not really sure I know what you are talking about.

Select the path which you want to use for the spacing tool, open the utility panel, and pick 'reset xform'... then open the modify panel, and right-click on the xform-modifier. choose 'collapse all'..

Again, I'm not sure if this solves your problem, but give it a go ;)

[Maven]

That worked! thank you!

So what did I do to cause this? What happend to the spline? I would like to know so I don't do it again.

[magicm]

You probably scaled the spline somewhere in the process... I did a quick test here, and found that the spacing tool somehow uses the scale of the spline, instead of 'world units'...

If you right click on the 'scale tool' while an object is selected, you see what it's current scaling is.. (doh!)

using the 'reset xform' utility will reset the transformation, so that the scaling goes to it's default value [100, 100, 100]

[Maven]

WELL. Thanks for that. that really screws up a lot. I did scale this model. I brought in a reference file from ACAD that is in Meters and when it is brought into 3ds it didn't match it was in feet and the only thing I could think of to do was to scale the ref. file by 328% to match the meters. I most have did this wrong.

Is there another way that I should have dealt with this scale mismatch?

[gaggle]

Under utilities as well there is one called Scale World, or something similar. It should be able to scale things globally as you like it.

Apart from that though, scaling in general can make things behave odd, so resetting the transforms is the way to fix that.

[magicm]

I think it's best to import the acad-file into a new scene, respecting it's system units.

in max5: Customize ---> Units Setup... ---> System Unit Setup ---> "Respect System Units in Files"... Make sure this is checked!

Then choose: File ---> Import, and import the acad file

When importing is done, make your changes to the units setup (again: Customize ---> Units Setup... ---> System Unit Setup)

Save to a max-file, and open the scene in which you want to import the acad-stuff... From there, merge the max-file you just saved.


I could be missing a step or so, but I'm not able to test it right now... hope this helps

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