3ds Max Tips/Tricks of the Day

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Feb 27 2009


By default, 3ds Max saves your files uncompressed. But there is an option to compress your files when it saves. To do so, go to Customize Menu > Preferences > Files Tab and check "Compress on Save". A scene with ten thousands teapots saved uncompressed takes up 36.0MB while the compressed one takes only 1.07MB.


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thanks bro for sharing!!

Thats great....I will try it.

TFS..

thanks a lot of this !

thanks sir. very helpfull! saves us more space...

thanks, sana dumami pa 2

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Nothing is more depressing & miserable than to find that your max scene is corrupted. A number of factors include:

- Some component built in another program has been imported or referenced with an XRef.

- The scene failed to save properly due to a power failure or system crash.

- A poorly coded plug-in corrupted an object in the scene.

Read what Mr. Help has to say:

The first thing to try is keep clicking the Retry button. If there is a corruption to the vertices of an object, you might have to parse through each vertex until you bypass the object completely. while sipping a bottle of beer to celebrate your dissapointments...

Another thing you can try is merging the scene. If the file is not too corrupted, you would be able to access the Merge dialog which shows a list of the components in the scene. This is a good sign because, with a little effort, you can fix the file yourself. You now need to narrow down which object, or objects, are causing the load failure.

Start with Geometry, Shapes, and Groups/Assemblies.

moral lesson: always keep a backup of your scene


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salamat po sa tips sir..
ngayon ko lang nalaman to... keep em comin' po para masaya!!!!

d lng lumiliit ung file pti ung rendering nya mas bumibilis compare to d uncompressed one. thanks for the info and kip on posting sir!!

o!? thanks sir... try ko din to... thanks for sharing..

oRangE.n.GreeN wrote:.

Feb 27 2009


By default, 3ds Max saves your files uncompressed. But there is an option to compress your files when it saves. To do so, go to Customize Menu > Preferences > Files Tab and check "Compress on Save". A scene with ten thousands teapots saved uncompressed takes up 36.0MB while the compressed one takes only 1.07MB.


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na try ko ang galing,,,from 2.3 mb na file bumaba ng 156 kb....galing,,,salamt boss O n G...

Thanks Orange n Green, learned something new today

when drawing splines, sometimes you have to draw vertex points outside of your viewport window, if you press "i" your viewport automatically centers to your mouse location!

oRangE.n.GreeN wrote:.


Nothing is more depressing & miserable than to find that your max scene is corrupted. A number of factors include:

- Some component built in another program has been imported or referenced with an XRef.

- The scene failed to save properly due to a power failure or system crash.

- A poorly coded plug-in corrupted an object in the scene.

Read what Mr. Help has to say:

The first thing to try is keep clicking the Retry button. If there is a corruption to the vertices of an object, you might have to parse through each vertex until you bypass the object completely. while sipping a bottle of beer to celebrate your dissapointments...

Another thing you can try is merging the scene. If the file is not too corrupted, you would be able to access the Merge dialog which shows a list of the components in the scene. This is a good sign because, with a little effort, you can fix the file yourself. You now need to narrow down which object, or objects, are causing the load failure.

Start with Geometry, Shapes, and Groups/Assemblies.

moral lesson: always keep a backup of your scene


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I've been experience also this bro that I have to merge the files for it never be open!

for max 9 users and earlier

if the max file "bloats" just invoke the garbage collection utility.

under the script box just type

gc ()

then resave.

oRangE.n.GreeN wrote:.

Feb 27 2009


By default, 3ds Max saves your files uncompressed. But there is an option to compress your files when it saves. To do so, go to Customize Menu > Preferences > Files Tab and check "Compress on Save". A scene with ten thousands teapots saved uncompressed takes up 36.0MB while the compressed one takes only 1.07MB.


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wow! this is a space saver for the hd. thanks.

AJ Cortez wrote:Thanks Orange n Green, learned something new today

when drawing splines, sometimes you have to draw vertex points outside of your viewport window, if you press "i" your viewport automatically centers to your mouse location!

Whoa!.. this answers my longtym prob.

Thanks man!

if you wish to undo several things you have done already, instead of pressing control Z or pressing undo icon one at a time. try to right click the undo icon and it will show you a list of the process you have taken then select the things you wish to undo.

but take note, undo command is limited to what your max have in defaults, tweaking it may add you more of the things you wish to undo. Just go to Customize ->> Preference ->> General then go to Scene undo..... the default there is only 20, just adjust it to your desires, then press OK

If you own a copy of the RPC plugin (or installed the demo), you can use features built into the RPC cars to animate any object along a path with Speed instead of Percent!

1. place the demo Peugeot 406(low res) in the scene, along with its connected path.
2. create a Dummy helper and align its position and rotation with the RPC car.
3. hide the RPC car, and link the object you want to animate to the Dummy
4. now when you animate the Speed of the RPC car, you are in effect animating the speed of the object in your scene.

Good luck

thanks master aj..

AJ Cortez wrote:If you own a copy of the RPC plugin (or installed the demo), you can use features built into the RPC cars to animate any object along a path with Speed instead of Percent!

1. place the demo Peugeot 406(low res) in the scene, along with its connected path.
2. create a Dummy helper and align its position and rotation with the RPC car.
3. hide the RPC car, and link the object you want to animate to the Dummy
4. now when you animate the Speed of the RPC car, you are in effect animating the speed of the object in your scene.

Good luck

a quick tip for those who uses Vray Distributed Rendering or Backburner and constantly struggling with missing maps, proxies, etc. when rendering over your network .

Press "Shift+T" or go to "File -> Asset Tracking". in its window go to "Paths -> Preferences" and click "Convert file paths to UNC".

This will automatically create the locations of all your user paths into Univeral Naming Convention paths. This means that all your render stations/nodes in your network will automatically understand your materials, IR maps/LC maps, vray proxies, etc. and you don't have to rename their location one by one.

just an example of UNC path is:
//RenderNode01/Projects/Maps/Ground/ground01.jpg
-Notice the "//" precedes the computer name "RenderNode01". This tells every node in your network that the location of "ground01.jpg" is within the computer "RenderNode01".

a common path is:
e:/Projects/Maps/Ground/ground01.jpg
-this path will not be recognized by your network and most likely cause "grey" renders or incorrect textures on your model.

so you can just imagine without this nifty feature you would have to find your maps and rename each path to UNC. wasting a lot of time when you can be rendering over the network and just relax while 20+ vray buckets from your 10 unit render farm blazes through your 3K+ resolution image.

Good tip Rockgem,

Very important to use UNC paths, there's nothing like showing up for work he next morning only to find out that none of your frames rendered because it was trying to find your missing texture maps all night.

There's also a utility called 'Resource Collection' which takes all of your maps and copies them into one folder that you choose.

rockgem wrote:a quick tip for those who uses Vray Distributed Rendering or Backburner and constantly struggling with missing maps, proxies, etc. when rendering over your network .

Press "Shift+T" or go to "File -> Asset Tracking". in its window go to "Paths -> Preferences" and click "Convert file paths to UNC".

This will automatically create the locations of all your user paths into Univeral Naming Convention paths. This means that all your render stations/nodes in your network will automatically understand your materials, IR maps/LC maps, vray proxies, etc. and you don't have to rename their location one by one.

just an example of UNC path is:
//RenderNode01/Projects/Maps/Ground/ground01.jpg
-Notice the "//" precedes the computer name "RenderNode01". This tells every node in your network that the location of "ground01.jpg" is within the computer "RenderNode01".

a common path is:
e:/Projects/Maps/Ground/ground01.jpg
-this path will not be recognized by your network and most likely cause "grey" renders or incorrect textures on your model.

so you can just imagine without this nifty feature you would have to find your maps and rename each path to UNC. wasting a lot of time when you can be rendering over the network and just relax while 20+ vray buckets from your 10 unit render farm blazes through your 3K+ resolution image.

... The only probs with RC is that it fails to take notice of ifl's.

here's a quick tip....but rather 'difficult' one....

....try avoiding Autodesk Max

nice answer!!heheh!...i hope this is joke!!

pricklypineapple wrote:here's a quick tip....but rather 'difficult' one....

....try avoiding Autodesk Max

lol..sarcastic..but kinda true...
personally, if there's a 'better'/ more stable/ more customer oriented friendly software out there -- that i could learn and practically apply, i'd damn switch alright!

...cursed not backward compaitbility for max files!
...cursed crashing due to bugs that never seemed resolved
...cursed Autodesk for coming up with Max2010....when 2009 hasn't been there for so long, and they got the nerve to ask their customers to switch to it.




on a lighter note.....
another quick tip.....this ones the "universal go-to-solution" with some, if not all probs encountered in max....
"ALT+H .. A ...Enter"