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Nats

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  1. No that didnt do anything useful but thanks anyway. I actually found out how to do it without resorting to UVWmaps which you dont need to use for procedural textures (because they go all the way through an object they dont wrap around it like a bitmap). You select options in the material editor and change the size of the representative samples in the editor. My samples were 3m spheres by default so no wonder the textures weren't showing correctly for things like handrails. I changed my sample spheres to be 300mm in size and that did the trick they look fine now.
  2. I am doing an archvis model in 3dsmax 2012 which has been set up using UK units (mm). When I am creating materials with procedural textures in the basic material creator and I apply them onto my objects they are appearing far too large com pared to how the look in the editor. For example I have created a paint texture with dimples, using a noise bump map, and it looks great in the editor but when I apply it in the scene the bumps are massive and I cant even lower the bumps low enough to appear correct on the model (I get to a noise scale of 0.001 and that seems to be the minimum but the bumps still look too large in the scene). On the other hand when I create bitmapped textures and apply them to the model it seems I have to tile them all around 10x in x and y using UVWmapping to get them to appear right. I am generally not using the real world scale setting when I do all these textures should I be using that all the time? Is this normal or is something wrong in my settings and is there anything I can do to get my textures to appear exactly as they appear in the material editor? And secondly am I right in assuming that I don't need to UVWmap objects if I am just using procedural maps? Thanks for any help.
  3. Tis ok - it seems to have found them, changed from Relative back to Absolute and it found them when I restarted Max. I had a look at Asset Tracking and it said 'found' after all of them so maybe that did it. Anyway its ok now. I thought it might have been the fact the Library was in my My Documents folder that was causing the problem but obviously not.
  4. Hi I am new to 3dsmax and having a problem with some asset models that I have used in a scene. I created this scene a while ago and since then have updated my computer and reinstalled max. When I now go into the scene I get a message saying all the assets have missing textures. I have re-set my project folder correctly and also added all the asset folders of the models (in a separate library folder at the moment) as user paths. I was wondering if I should copy all the models into me project folder rather than leaving them in my library as I have presently? Or should I leave them in the library and just change some other max setting? I was wondering what professionals do with their 3d models? These ones are of boats that have been created by other people but I will shortly be also wanting to get some cars and people into my model as well. Is it better leaving all these 'standard' models in a library where they will no doubt be used on several jobs. Or are they better copied into the project folder of any project I use them on. That would increase the disk space required quite a bit I would think and if I ever want to change them I would have to change every one in every project so I cant see that being very sensible? Any advice would be really appreciated thank you.
  5. Just seen a forum message about someone having 27M polys in a scene so I guess this isnt that large after all! Just found out though that my motherboard cant take more than 4GB RAM. Maybe in time I will be able to afford to upgrade to a new motherboard. But at the moment I am upgrading to Windows 7 64bit (From 32bit XP) and 4GB RAM (instead of 3GB) and hopefully that may help render this scene successfully. Could anyone comment on how large a scene this kind of set up may be able to reasonably handle without crashing? I really need to get this rendered after all this work!! HELP :-/ Do I have to cut the poly detail down? Also if anyone could help with some useful non-too-serious rendering limits I could apply to get this rendered without losing too much detail taht would be really helpful - I am completely unknowledgable about mental ray rendering at the moment?
  6. Hi I am new to 3dsmax and working on a private project which just about has everything possible in it - several large buildings, banks of roads and grass, trees, the sea, several complex boat exhibits outside, lots of people, lots of cars, complex tubular roof structures, etc etc. Suffice it to say the size of the file to date is 160Mb and poly count is over 3 million and I have yet to apply lighting and mapping - so its a big scene I would think even for a decent Arch Vis render. I am mainly using it to learn with but obviously I do want to render some nice views as well at the end of the day. At the moment I have 32bit Max, 3Gb Ram and only WinXP Home so Max is crashing when I try to render past 600x480 size due to memory. Also, considering I dont have much of an idea about rendering settings yet, I am uncertain whether these are set right or are far too high - at the moment I am trying to render with settings kept as Max comes ie default. Now what I would like to know is: Firstly is this a reasonable size for a complex Arch Vis project at all or is it well over the top. Just out of interest what are reasonable Arch Vis file sizes usually? I know its probably a matter of 'how long is a piece of string' but getting an idea of typical maximum file sizes to aim for would be useful to know for the future. Secondly I want to upgrade to 64 bit Max, Windows 7 64 bit, and get more RAM to cope with rendering such scenes. What RAM should I get? Would 8MB be sufficient do you think to enable me to render large scenes reasonably well? The official Autodesk system requirements say 8Mb is ok but is it very suitable in practice for large scenes? Thank you for any comments.
  7. From the manual: Generic Units (The default.) A Generic or “system” unit in 3ds Max is equal to one inch. You can treat it as an arbitrary unit of your own definition, unless your scene uses features that depend on real-world measurements, such as photometric lights, Use Real-World Scale for bitmaps, and so on. Warning If you are modeling an object that includes details whose dimensions are very much less than one inch, treat the Generic unit as an arbitrary unit that is smaller than one inch: for example, 1 unit = 1/50 of an inch. Otherwise, you might encounter problems with your model that are due to roundoff error. This is why I now think most of these boat models are right off in terms of scale. I bet most of the people who modelled these things just used bitmap references off the internet that werent at any particular scale or were scanned in, and just modelled straight off those. The fact that 3dsmax is defaulted to 'generic units' must surely mean that most people are going to model a generic model that is not to a particular scale (even though they do say that the generic unit is 1 inch). Personally, coming from an architectural background, I cannot believe anyone doing a model would do it 'not to scale' (as I put on my architectural sketches). Surely the very fact you are trying to make a real lifelike model means you should be doing it an accurate size. I mean whats the point modelling a Ferrari at 40m long? Seems completely daft. Anyway it looks like I am going to have to get some data on the sizes of these boats and scale them to suit. What a pain.
  8. I agree that the display units setting should have no bearing on the actual model size it simply affects how the displayed measurements are depicted, its only the system units setting that determines the size of the model ie whether its drawn in inches or m or mm. When you think about it you are modelling everything in real size anyway - so it doesnt matter whether you are using inches or mm to model it. Two identical Mazda cars one modelled in Imperial and one in Metric units should surely be identical when placed side by side in the same file shouldnt they? If you merge the Imperial one into the metric file and select 'keep file units' the cars should come out exactly the same size shouldnt they? Anyway as an experiment I have just opened up the E-boat max file I have which has its file system units set in inches. And when the dialog came up saying the file has different units from my normal max (which I have set at mm usually) I selected 'use file system units'. I then measured the length of the MG42 machine gun on the boat which should be around 1220mm long (48.8 inches) in real life and in the model it measures 381 generic units, 9649 mm and 379 inches (depending on what I choose for the display units) neither of which is correct. However a King George ship model I had a look at, which was again modelled in inches, measures correctly. I have also looked at some of my car models from the internet and some of them also are scaled wierdly as I mentioned above scaling at 9m wide. Yet others scale correctly (generally the metrically modelled ones). So I am now wondering whether some of these internet files have somehow been randomly scaled at source? Perhaps it was done deliberately to make them relatively unusable I dont know? Seems a daft thing to do to me - put models on the internet but have them modelled as a completely unrealistic size? Has anyone else come across this kind of thing before?
  9. Yeah but if I am trying to import a boat which is drawn using inch system units and generic display units, how do I get that into my architectural plan at the right size - which has system units of mm? Do I have to do something in the original file first before I import it? I would have thought that the model would have just intelligently rescaled itself correctly on merge but it obviously hasnt. I have looked at a few car models I got off the internet as well. Again they were drawn in inch system units and generic display units. Without changing the units at all when I measure across the car width I get a measurement of 367? Whats that supposed to be? You would think that it would be inches - but that would work out that the car is 9m wide so its not inches. So whats is the model drawn in? And how would I get this to be scaled in mm? The car should be around 1.5m wide in reality. Any help appreciated I am completely lost here.
  10. Hi Ive done a 3d model with the units in mm as you would expect with me working in the UK as all architects work in mm here. But I am trying to merge some max boat files and they are coming in massive. Fine I think, as the ship was probably done in the US, so I select change system units to inches to suit suit and then the boat comes in really small. I cant understand it. So I go into the original boat files themselves and a dialog comes up saying units are differnet so I select 'change system unit to file units' (inches) and I go into the model and the system units are in inches and the display units are set as generic units for some reason? When I check the model size using measure tool the scaling seems to be far too large - for example a flag on a U boat is scaling at 3m across when it should be probably around 1m across). So I have no idea whats going on. What is the process for merging such vehicles etc into architecctural models, where the units are in mm so, they scale correctly? I am used to scaling engineers drawings down by 1000 here in the UK - as engineers always draw in meters not mm so perhaps I need to scale these models down by 25.4 to get the inches into mm? Dunno. Anyone? Any help greatly appreciated as I am new to this Max units conversion thing and this has me completely lost.
  11. Well I manged to do it by measuring the angle in Autocad and then rotating it that exact angle in 3dsmax. But I cant beleive there isnt a way to do this in Max directly. All these flaming new versions they keep bringing out and still they havent addressed something as fundamental as this - seems unbelievable. Using a transparent 'ref' command to align things in autocad whilst roating and scaling is absolutely fundamental for any kind of accuracy. This particularly makes scale almost completely useless to resize anything sensibly. Maybe I am just trying to be too fiddly but being an architect I cant help expecting some kind of accuracy.
  12. Thanks for the reply. Yes I know about that how to key in an exact rotation angle but I dont know what roatation angle I need. I have drawn a line at the exact rotation angle I want to align it to but I cant find out what angle the line is drawn at so I cant rotate my object accurately to match it. How do I match the rotation angle perfectly? And how do I find out what angle the line is drawn at? Stupidly enough an angle readout does appear when you start drawing the line but as soon as you snap onto something it disappears which is exactly the point at which I need the angle readout - its really really frustrating that this seems impossible to do. To explain what I am trying to do I have a set of site steps that are not aligned east west but slightly off a normal angle (as you would expect with a site plan) and I have imported the profile of the steps from autocad and extruded the spline to get them as a 3d object. But now I need to align the steps object to the line of the steps in the cad plan and I cant do it accurately at all. I suppose I could go into Autocad and measure the exact angle of rotation of the site steps there and then come back into 3dsmax and rotate the 3d object that amount but that seems ludicrous that there is no way to do it in 3dsmax directly. How does anyone manage to do things accurately in 3dsmax? Its the one massive failing of the program it seems to me? Unless I am, as I said, just missing something crucial as I am quite new to the program I suppose coming from an Autocad background I am so used to being able to draw things in micrometres of precision that I cant get used to using Max and being lucky to get things within a few mm. But if I get the steps even slightly off in terms of their rotation there will be a small gap between them and the grass at the end furthest from the rotation gizmo (where the rotation inaccuracy will be the most noticable) which will look pretty horrible once rendered right?)
  13. I am trying to rotate something. I have inserted it into a drawing from Autocad in which I orientated it to suit its exact rotation in a cad plan. Now in 3dsmax I need to rotate it upright whilst keeping its peculiar angle in x and y, but the rotate gizmo is defaulting to the usual straight xyz directions. Is there any way I can reorientate the gizmo to the peculiar axis I ned to use for the rotation? To scale or rotate anything accurately in Autocad I use the 'ref' command to align something to an already drawn line very accurately. I cant seem to find anything in 3dsmax to enable this kind of accuracy when using rotate and scale. In fact it seems the only way to do it is get it as close as possible by eye. Is this right? Is there any means of rotating/scaling accurately in 3dsmax - ie at perculiar angles other than by whole degrees? Another example: if I have a line in plan at say 22.34 degrees how would I rotate something to match that line accurately if I dont know the exact angle it was drawn at? Anyway to do it? Or is by eye the only way? Am I missing something huge here about using 3dsmax accurately?
  14. Nats

    Modeling help

    No turbosmooth is only useful for rounding whole elements. For the arches you just want to select each arch soffit and then apply a smoothing group to it - this will make them look smooth without needing a high poly count. Exactl;y the same thing is done with a cylindr object - it has a smoothing group applied to the curved edge and a separate smoothing roup applied to the stright surfaces. By using two smoothing groups it retains the sharp edge. If it had the same smoothing roup applied all over it would be the same as applying a turbo smooth over the cylinder - it would look like a pill shape with rounded corners. If I was you I would take a look here: http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_videonav.php?fid=81f1fa27604fbc21734bbd1535683e7d Look through those AT-AT videos they show smoothing groups in use quite a bit, apart from that they are a brilliant way to learn great poly modelling. PS You should get some CAD software - I use it all the time for drawing elevations and lines for loft paths etc, its far far easier than messing around with 3dsmax and its terrible drafting tools (if you can call them that).
  15. Nats

    Modeling help

    The way I would do it also is to draw the windows in Autocad first and import the arched lines as legacy archicad elements onto the elevation to use to model from. I would select the two edges above each window arch and the arch soffit and 'connect' those polys about eight times to split up the polygons. Then I would go to vertex level and manually move each of the 16 vertices on the arch soffit to match the autocad drawn arches for each opening. You could possibly then smooth out the arch soffit using a smoothing group. Thats if the arches are in a solid wall such as brick. If the arches are part of a stone feature lintol or are arched brick voussiours I would probably draw the stone feature as a spline and extrude it into a solid shape and then locate it onto each wall above each window. A variation on the above would be to draw the whole wall including the arch windows as a 2d spline with arched windows as attached splines and then just extrude the whole thing the depth of the cavity wall and delete any redundant polygon faces (inner faces etc) that you dont need. Hope that helps.
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