3ds Max - Troubleshooting & General Discussion

[Starglow 45]

Alright, thanks!  i've got it in 3DS Max  and I'll try moving forward from there!

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Is anybody here using 3ds Max 2015 and having weird bugs on the viewport? At least the previews look good, I hope it can also export the models successfully

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I've been using 2015 and the only viewport problems are the ones that normally happen. What viewport problems are you having?

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Some parts of the buildings are getting too dark while the others are normal. Also, when I use that tool to select polygons/faces/etc, it doesn't turn reddish what I select.

[SimCoug 5,972]

Do you guys have any suggestions regarding 3ds Max beginners tutorials... maybe ones that would highlight the tools geared towards our neck of the woods (exterior building modeling)?  Youtube has about a billion, so I thought maybe I could narrow my search.  Thanks 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

22 hours ago, SimCoug said:

Do you guys have any suggestions regarding 3ds Max beginners tutorials... maybe ones that would highlight the tools geared towards our neck of the woods (exterior building modeling)?  Youtube has about a billion, so I thought maybe I could narrow my search.  Thanks 

The kind of modeling that we need to do is very simple. Searching for architectural visualization tutorials will be helpful because they also tend to feature simple modeling but when I tried searching for one none of them showed the basic modeling because it was just so basic. 

But I just ran across these two autodesk tutorials which cover 99% of what you need to know for modeling for BATing. 

 

 

For modeling buildings (usually) instead of starting with a box you'd start with a plane, and then you Cut (I personally use Quickslice which is similar) all of the lines you need on the facade and then you Extrude inward or outward to make various parts of the facade. The Connect and Inset tools shown are good for making window frames. 

You don't need to model the entire building starting from one object though. Maybe you start with a plane for doing the basic wall, but then for the cornice or other elements you would start with new objects. For example there was a lamp attached to the facade you would model that separately and then move it into place. And as you go along you can use the Detach and Attach buttons to manage your objects. I oftentimes attach objects which are finished and which share the same material. So at the end I might have one or two objects that share the same brick material. Or for windows, I keep the frames and glass as one object, because it keeps the model simpler and easier to work with (you can read more about this in a tutorial in my thread). 

Something in the tutorial that you'll never use is Turbosmooth. You can see what it does in the video but we never really need to model anything like that. Even when we're modeling sculptures, at the scale SC4 is at it's so low-res that you can't tell that your rough model is rough. 

Something that I don't think the tutorial mentioned is smoothing groups. You can see in the lower right that there's a smoothing groups rollout. If two adjacent polygons share the same smoothing group, then the edges will have a fake smoothing effect applied to them. So for example if you make a sphere, the polygons will by default share a smoothing group so that the sphere appears smooth instead of faceted. But when you model things the default smoothing groups aren't always great, so I always clear all of the smoothing groups to ensure that all of the edges are hard, which is what we almost always want when modeling buildings. To make things share a smoothing group, select the faces and then click one of the numbers (the numbers themselves are arbitrary). 

Something super important that the video doesn't cover is "snaps". These basically control what your cursor snaps to while working to ensure precision. You can snap to the grid, you can snap to vertexes, you can snap to all kinds of things. And also for simplicity in the video they do a lot of sloppy modeling by clicking and dragging, but you should almost always use the little boxes to the right of the buttons. So that when you extrude you're extruding by say 0.2 m instead of 0.18592 m. 

There's a few other things but I can't think of them right now. Still though, the video above will show you how to do 99% of the modeling you'll need to do for SC4. You just have to look at a given situation and think about how you can use those tools to make the shapes you need.

I still want to do a video where I do a BAT from start to finish, but I'm not even going to start thinking about it until I'm done with the Guardian Building which I'm still neck deep in. 

[SimCoug 5,972]

Thank you @Jasoncw!  That was exactly what I was looking for.  I have been using sketchup for a while now to model my woodworking projects, so when I started looking at 3d max tutorials my eyes glazed over after they whipped through a million different tools.  Poly modeling is much more my cup of tea.  

[madhatter106 3,903]

6 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

I still want to do a video where I do a BAT from start to finish, but I'm not even going to start thinking about it until I'm done with the Guardian Building which I'm still neck deep in. 

Even though I use gmax only, I would totally watch that.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I don't have any experience with (or knowledge of) these tools, but one thing I often encountered is that people cling to the subject to be modeled (cars, ships, buildings, whatever...) and are worried when they don't find corresponding tutorials. However, any object can be broken down into the basic geometric shapes and objects, and if you know how to model these, you can build pretty much anything. For example, if you know how to model and manipulate cylindrical objects, this will help you no matter whether the modified cylinder ends up as a car wheel, a nuclear submarine, a column on a Roman temple, or the barrel of a battle tank.

So my advice as a non-user and non-expert for people trying their hands on 3D modeling would be: Don't get discouraged if you don't seem to find tutorials relating to your subject matter - in the end it all boils down to geometry anyway.

[SecretMbr_735754 2,157]

With the above said, here is my first creation of an original .3ds file depicted in gmax and in Sketchup.   I simply call it the device.  I've now taken the first baby step to joining the BATman club.

 

[vivarenedius 9]

i have 3dsmax and bat4max but cannot test a export a scene

[Ceafus 88 1,794]

I am having an issue with my 3ds Max software getting stuck on "Initializing" when I try to start it up.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

On 10/4/2017 at 1:46 AM, Ceafus 88 said:

I am having an issue with my 3ds Max software getting stuck on "Initializing" when I try to start it up.

I don't know if you already fixed it, but it happened to me once and the only way I found was reinstalling the software.