General FAQ - Answer to . . .

#141

in track view how do I move one of a key’s bezier handles without affecting its other?

#142

hold the SHIFT key and adjust the handle as you need :slight_smile:

#143

Need Help

I designed car in 3Ds Max then move it on path constraint after that i select the end frame in
Graph Editor/curve editor to put Set tengent to slow but that not responding.

Please help me

Thanks
Ali

#144

path constraint is not the best method to animate the main car if you plan to adjust speed and such at some points in your animation… but to the point - yes there is no way to work with bezier keys with path constraint controller (atleast I don’t know of any) but you can manualy add more keys in curve editor to make the effect you need… maybe there is a way to make nice and precise animation with path constraint but I would suggest you use motion/trajectories+curve editor to make the best looking effect or try to find some cool car animation plugin…

#145

How do I reset the bounding box?

Is there a snap to centre of object (not pivot)?

#146

My gixmos have disappeared. I tried the x key and the prefrences. Still nothing. Any ideas?

Thanks

#147

Check your keyboard shortcuts, maybe the gizmo thing is not assigned to x on your keyboard.

#148

Kanala

Thanks that worked for the translate, scale, and rotate. However, I don’t get any other gizmos. For example I tried to apply a taper to a piece of geometry, but no gizmo appeared.

Does anyone have any solutions for that?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Caveman

#149

I can’t see the Common Paramaters map, only the General Paramaters map and a bunch of others that I don’t need. Any way to fix that?

#150

Hi guys.
I’ve asked a question about materials before, not knowing about this thread, but now I have another question related to it:
How do I change a material by renaming it without overriding the previous one?
It happend only once that I changed some material and got a messege which suggests me to rename it, in all other cases the old material was overrided.

Thanks in advance.
Hopefuly one day I’ll be able to answer question myself :slight_smile:

#151

So here’s a max question, why did Autodesk decide to release 3dsmax 2009 earlier this year when 3dsmax 2008 didn’t come out just that long ago? Was there really a purpose for this?..I was expecting max 2009 to be coming out in the fall this year. Are there any differences among the two in the first place? (I’ve been using max 9 for a little while).

#152

Hi there. I’m a complete novice at Max, but I may have to rig a character in Max. The characters are to be animated as crowds cheering.

I’m wondering if biped would be a good solution for this? Are there limitations I should know about? Can I rig with biped and animate just like that? If so, can I save out the animations for reuse, use them on other characters, etc?

#153

Hi everyone. Just started 3dsmaxing a few months ago, so I’m still crap. One problem has been with me continuously throughout my attempts at learning 3dsmax (JPost said something similar in an earlier post, but I haven’t been able to find a solution).

Whilst pressing the middle mouse button down (and using ALT) to pan and zoom around, I’ve noticed that I have no particular control over what the viewfinders main focus is! Sometimes I’ll select an object and it will automatically be centered as the focal point (so panning and zooming around it is easy); however sometimes something random is just in focus (like the grid or some complete other object and not the selected one) and I don’t know how to switch the focus back onto the selected object. I end up panning and zooming for several minutes just to be able to get the view to a workable place - it’s absolutely killing me sometimes!.

Anyone know if there is a button or shortcut to force the viewfinder to focus on the selected item and keep it in the center of focus?

sorry for the mangled explanation, it’s difficult to explain without pointing one’s finger at the screen and raging lol.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

#154

In the bottom right corner you have all your navigation controls. The one you’re looking for is called Orbit (right of the hand icon). If you click and hold over it, you’ll get 3 types of orbiting. The gray colored one orbits around the world center, the white one orbits around a selected object and the yellow one orbits around the selected sub-object component. For more info, type ‘orbit’ in the 3ds max help.

#155

I know i had it. I know i got it somehow from here. I’ve searched on here and google and so forth but i just can’t find the bloody plugin. It takes your uvw map and exports it as a series of splines which makes texturing totally awesomecore easy.

Help me cgtalk please!

#156

so fellow artists I also have al litte problem

I started 3ds max today to keep on working on my first model, but just after I hit the meshsmooth mod I had to realize that all my 4edged polygons broke into triangles (even before meshsmooth but meshsmooth indicated that something was not correct).
So it seems that I did something completely wrong yesterday night, drowsy as I was.
But I just can remeber my workflow and I am sure that I did not apply any filter or modifications!

So could you tell me:
how this could have happended so that I can avoid it another time
and if its possible to undo this step when there is no history available.

thanks a lot you virtuosi of cg :),
Victor

#157

Hey guys!

I am new to 3Ds Max and would like to ask you something.

I want to model a car, but when I put my blueprints on a planes the quality of the image falls down so bad that I can barely see my blueprint. I’ve asked a few guys who knows Max more than I do (which at this stage is ANYONE), and they cant help me, I’ve looked on the internet…nothing.

So if you know a solution for this problem I would really appriciate your help.

Thank you

#158

This is actually a relatively simple issue and an annoying one…cause it’s kind of buried in the options…

Goto Customize->Preferences

Click on the Viewports tab and click “configure driver”

In the “Appearance Preferences” group, make sure the background texture and download texture size are the same…personal I prefer 512, but this kind of over kill…

Also, make sure that “Match Bitmap Size as Closely as Possible” in both groups are selected.

That should help
Shane

#159

Yes! I can see it a lot better now…its not PERFECT, but its enough for me to start modeling.

I’ve been sitting with this problem for 2 weeks now already.

Thanks a lot Shane.

#160

Ok stupid question here, so I figured this is the thread to post it in since it relates so closely to the original few posts… :wink:

I know adaptive degradation is one of those annoying features that most low poly modelers dread after accidentally hitting O and not realizing it.

Well, my client on an architectural rendering project has me slicing a stupidly high poly 3d version of their building one floor at a time through hundreds of little pieces so they can render it one floor at a time in cutaway views. All was going well once I figured out I could save time (and booleans) by merging all the objects that shared materials.

Suddenly to my horror, adaptive degradation stopped working! I press the O key to no avail. I fiddle with the settings under viewport configuration. Nothing works, it just doesn’t degrade anymore. I even checked my UI settings to make sure O was still the hotkey.

Any ideas why adaptive degradation would stop working and how to get it back? The model is a bit over 2 million polies and it’s a real pain to rotate around the thing without it! :smiley:

Edit: To further answer the previous person’s question in this thread, 3dsmax for some reason best displays textures that are proportioned in powers of 2. If your texture is not in a power of 2 ratio, it WILL resample your image, no matter how closely you tell it to match your resolution. The simplest solution is to resize your image in photoshop to a power of 2 in its longest dimension, then change canvas size to that same power of 2 in the shortest dimension. So a 2560x758 reference image would be resized to a 2048x2048 or 1024x1024 image. It’ll display flawlessly every time. Also, Max doesn’t like resolutions higher than 4096x4096.