Perspective viewport help

[Anonymous]

Hi, hope you guys can help - Image below!

for some reason my perspective viewport has gone black and i dont understand why?
i was zooming in and out with the mouse scroll wheel and then for some reason i could not zoom in close to my model anymore
this was then followed by my model turning black

any advice as to wat this may be?

im not sure but i think by using pan and zooming with the mouse wheel at the same time determines how close you can zoom in to your model. Can anyone confirm this and by doing this have i screwed something up?

it almost looks like degradation - i can still see my model however it is blacked in in an almost sketchy looking way,
other viewports are still normal, its just the perspective one that has the issue and as you can imagine its making it very hard to work

im using 3ds max 9

Is there perhaps even a way to reset or reload the perspective viewort to default to see if something simple like that would fix the problem?

thanks for the help

[Steve_Curley]

Rough guess - your System units don't match the scale of your objects and/or your models are too far from the origin.
If possible zip your scene and post it here so we can see all the settings.

Note. Duplicate threads fragment any replies you may receive and they break the forum rules.. This forum is more appropropriate than the Modeling forum for this question, so the other thread has been removed.

[Anonymous]

apoligies and thanks for removing the other post

by zipping the scene do you want to see the whole screen? or do you want me to zip the file so that you can open it if thats possible?

anyways here is the whole screen if that helps

thanks

[Steve_Curley]

The actual scene - the .max file zipped (if you're allowed to post it) - maximum attachment size is 3.5MB (that's the size of the zip, not the scene). Attach the zip to a reply in the same way as you added your screenshots.

[Anonymous]

got ya! ok here it is

thanks again m8, i owe you a lot for all the help you have given me over the past week lol

19746_0WdZ7wpZRlrx0MJx2G6m.zip

[Steve_Curley]

Definitely a scale issue.

You have System units of Inches, but Display Units of mm - not a good idea to mix Imperial and Metric. If you switch to "generic" display units and select the big freen box, it is roughly 9000 * 9000 (use the Measure on the Utility Panel). Question is - 9000 what? It's (roughly) 230,000 by 250,000 mm (with your original settings). You begin to see why having them mismatched is a bad idea..

So the problem is choosing the most appropriate System Units, then rescaling the entire scene to match them. Modeling a scene of that size in mm is not a good idea - Max doesn't like very large, or very small dimensions or very large or small distances from the origin, so mm are out. Metres seems to work the best, though you may still see some artifacts if you zoom out too far.

We need to convert the current size in inches (9000) into mm (*25.4) then divide by 1000 to get Meters, but there are some oddites in there which won't scale properly.
Select Boxes 44, 45, 47, 48 and 49 and apply a Reset XForm. I suspect you scaled them at the object level at some point.

Change the System Units to "1 unit = 1mm"
Then use the Rescale World with a value of 25.4 to bring it all to mm
Change the System Units to Meters
Then use the Rescale World with a value of 0.001 to bring it to Meters.
Try all that on a copy of the original and see how you get on with it.

A couple of other things.
Making walls out of boxes is not the normal way to make them. If I havent pointed it out before, there's a good thread here
Box49 seems to have a hole in it. No vertices, no edges, just a hole. How on earth you managed that I have no idea 😉

[Anonymous]

i did say i was a noob lol and boxes for walls i dont know i thought it would be easier

cheers il see if i can sort this just now and il let you know shortly what happens.

[Anonymous]

ok done everything so far but i dont know how to apply a reset xform so if you could just clarify where i activate that and also where i can find the rescale world thingy cos i cannot find that either =S

[Steve_Curley]

Both are on the Command Panel > Utilities (tab) - the right-most one.
If the buttons aren't there, click "More" and select from the list.

Btw you need to do the things I mentioned in sequence - if you do them out of sequence they may well not work as expected.

[Anonymous]

ok i did everything in the order you mentioned and the issue is unfortunately still there =( in the perspective viewport all that has changed is that i cant zoom in to my model close at all now lol (the model is smaller) is there a way to adjust how far in to your model you can zoom?

I dont know if you have any other suggestions as to how this mite be fixed? =S
It is quite a strange issue i presume

thanks again

[Steve_Curley]

It's working ok here. Select the object you want to work on and press Z - that resets the zooming so you should be able to go in/out to your hearts content 😉

Incorrect scale - especially with the system and display units different - is quite common, unfortunately.

[Anonymous]

ok i have tried something!

I have selected all the objects and exported them to my desktop
then iv set up a new scene and set the units right and imported the objects

ta da! i have my perspective view back and everything is normal except 1 thing?
There is no colour in the perspective viewport =S do you know anyway to sort that out?

This mite only fix the problem temporarily and it mite eventually go back to black however it allows me to continue working as i am unfortunately on a time limit

trying to get a nice 3ds max model together for my presentation on tuesday, not too much left to build so hopefully it will hold up til im finished however i do need the colour back.

If you have any suggestions as to how i can get the colour in the perspective viewport or have maybe thought of something to sort my original file i would appreciate if you could let me know ASAP

I cant say thanks enough... I will become good at this package one day 😃

[Steve_Curley]

That's probably down to which export and import option you used. Can you change the Wireframe colour? With the object selected there should be a small square of colour by the object name in the modify panel.. If that doesn't work it may have imported them onto a Layer and set the colours to be "by layer". Try reimporting them but look carefully at the options in the Import. There should be a way of importing them by object rather than by layer.

[Anonymous]

woohoo! ok i tried the select object and z for zoom thing you spoke of and it fixed the issue

as you say if i zoom out too far it goes a wee bit ify however i dont have to zoom out so im sorted for the time being

thank you very much your a genious
no doubt you'll be hearing from me again soon about some other issue =(

however for the time being i can continue

cheers 😛