Varchi

Anyone have any ideas on how to get 3ds max to show objects with transparent maxwell materials as transparent in the viewport? (other than making the object see-through)

Heh, no ideas? Would more details help? I have a series of bones to which boxes are linked to create a repetition of rectangular frames. Along one end of these rectangular frames/bone-chains there is a path to which the IK solvers are linked (at percentage increments equal to the number of rectangular frames). This setup allows me to flex the vertices of the path, which flexes the IK solvers, which bends each frame like arms. You can imagine the setup looking like caterpillar legs extending vertically from a ground. I simply want the path flexing to live update the arms. To update the arms, I have to advance an animation frame (then regress an animation frame). Thoughts? I'll post a jpg or avi as soon as I can.

Is there any way to automatically update the viewport as I'm flexing sub-objects of a path to which I have geometry constrained? So far, I can only update the state of the geometry by advancing a frame and back.

Fixed: the preview simply doesn't work while using the nitrous driver. Go to the viewports tab under preferences and choose another driver.

The stand-in lines that represent the blades of grass aren't showing up in 3ds max, but the grass still renders after sending to maxwell. Is anyone else having problems with this plugin?

I don't know why I didn't think to identify texture and geometry problems via elimination. Thanks for the input. I'm going to have to keep these options in mind for the future. As for the problem at hand. Max was peaking at 1gb ish for ram consumption. 2010 64bit. I have max 6gb ddr3. I still might proceed with your suggestions, but the odd thing is, rendering without the batch actually worked. It still hesitated at the freezing points of the render, but it crunched through to the next frame. I checked all the settings that I can I think to check between the batch setup and the regular setup. They both look the same. Does this shed any light on the issue at hand? Does the batch render option behave differently? Also yes, I'll start rendering individual frames from now on. It makes sense and seems that it would reduce the potential points for error. Is After Effects the best option for post? I have both AE and premiere.

I'm rendering a 10 second animation @ 24fps. The model is quite large. There are 6 buildings and a large (but not insanely detailed) terrain. There are two large cylinders beyond the terrain with respective sky and treeline textures. The cameras are set to run along paths over the 10 seconds. There are 9 cameras; so, I set up a batch render for the animations. On the first camera/render/video the rendering will stop in the middle of rendering a frame. Sometimes it's frame 4. Sometimes it's others. The first few will render fine with a slight hesitation as the line approaches and crosses the buildings in the distance, but usually around frame 8 it stops completely at the buildings in the distance. This is only a scanline rendering of simple geometry. I can't understand or troubleshoot the reason it's stopping randomly so early on in the animation frames. Any ideas why this is happening? Am i missing any important details? I've tried all the types of video compression as well.

I had kind of given up on this for the time being, but it just started messing up on me in a relatively simple scene. I noticed that the set keys button (the one with the key at the bottom) flashes in a somewhat correlative manner with the hesitation of the walkthrough tool. By flash I mean the key turns gray. I'm not well versed on animation and shortcuts involved. Are there any toggle shortcuts involved with animation that could mess with the walkthrough tool?

Negative Ghost Rider. Thanks, but no luck with that.

So I'm trying to manipulate the vertices and edges on an editable poly. Is there any reason why the cut tool is only detecting the edges and vertices of borders? Hovering over interior vertices and edges reveals no cursor change and will do nothing if clicked upon.

I suppose I could just import a building dwg into a max file, xref that building max file into the scene max file, and align the xref. It's nice to have a separate building max file for materials and layers. I guess I meant for this to be a bit more open. Is this the best way to manage this kind of set up? Would using containers be more appropriate? How can I manage the numerous layers, same-name layer conflicts, and same-name block conflicts that come with dwgs to max?

Here is my goal. I'm building a collection of detailed DWGs of buildings in AutoCAD. These buildings need to be imported into a larger scale MAX that is composed of landscape and hardscape. So far I've been creating the DWGs with the buildings aligned with the default coordinate system. Their position and rotation are different in the final MAX file; so, I've been creating a duplicate CAD file that aligns the buildings before import into the MAX file. I hate to use a duplicate DWG file just to move and rotate a building and that needs realignment every time a change needs to cascade from building file to landscape file. My current solution is a MAX file for each building that does the alignment and materials only once for an easy import via containers into the larger MAX landscape file. How could I use an intermediate MAX file to align the building once? To summarize, I need a MAX file to import and re-import the same DWG as changes are made without the need to realign the imported content.

I'm beginning to think the same. My hands are always flying all over the keyboard when I'm cleaning up vertices. I wonder if I end up hitting some multi-key shortcut that toggles something similar to what you mentioned. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one with this annoying problem.

I feel like Bill Murray in Life Aquatic when he's swiping away leeches: "Really just me?" No one ever have this problem? Any suggestions at all? Update: Turns out it was a performance issue. That's my best guess. Reopening the drawing hadn't helped before, but it seems to be working today.

After searching quite a bit, I'm fairly certain this problem has yet to be addressed. While using the walk through tool it hangs after a certain increment and only continues after I move my mouse or press another movement key. Example: I'm holding both the left mouse button down and holding down the up arrow. The view will progress forward and stop at the same time increment every time. To move again I either move the mouse while the button is still held or repress the up arrow. This happens with any direction and any key used. Speeding or slowing the tool will only increase the distance the camera travels but not the time in which it travels before stopping. By the way new drawings do not do this; however, I don't think the problem relates to content. I suspect I've incidentally hit some other shortcut that is causing this behavior. It's a large model and I'd rather not trouble shoot it just yet by importing it into another drawing. Can anyone help me with this? I've never had this problem before. I'm using 3ds Max 2011 64bit on Windows 7