Max viewport and objects start stuttering/snapping on large scale scenes! On perspective but not Ortho.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I've known of the long problem of how max starts stuttering when working with large scale scenes, anything above 300 meters from point zero the accuracy of any trasnforamtion done on any object start stuttering and snapping.

People had long discussions about this and some told me it has to do with lack of double precision in max.

However when I switched my vieport from perspective mode to orthographic, everything was running smooth again, I could rotate and move smoothly even kilometers away form point Zero.

What is going on in perspective mode and what is causing this issue?

[Anonymous]

Bump, the question is, if it was an issue with double or single precision how come it works in orthograpphic view?

[Anonymous]

To better illustrate what I mean.

Identical settings in Maya and Max.

World units both system and display: 1 unit = 1 cm

Standard teapot 200 cm in radius (size doesn't matter it can be 50000 cm).

move teapot away from world origin ast approximately 1500 meters or 130000 cm.

Teapot in Max starts jittering and snapping during move tool (in perspective viewport only not ortho or left/right etc..).

Teapot in Maya has no such problems at all even if the Teapot moves Kilometers away from world origin.

Gif below Illustrates the problem.

[Anonymous]

I have received some feedback at CGtalk about this issue,

https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/3ds-max-and-precision-problems-away-from-world-origin-maya-has-no-suc...

Contrary to my speculation it may not be an issue oif double or single precision but rather a bug in the perspective viewport or a shortcoming there, which is preventing screen delta values of mouse pointer to be correctly trasnfered to world values, hence causing any position  trasnform away form world origin is causing massive stuttering and losing precision. 

Can we please have Autodesk devs or managers here to clarify this issue and find possible solutions? We are seriously thinking of using another software entirely becuase of this one issue!

[Anonymous]

Wow these forums are this F*kin dead? Nicely done by a multi billion dollar corporation. No one even bothers from the higher ups to give it a  glance. To hell with customers I suppose?

[senorpablo]

I've experienced plenty of precision issues in perspective view when working in units that were not well suite to the task. For example, using meters when working on precise parts with details in the mm range. I always use an orthographic/user view to avoid any precision issues, especially with zooming. Ortho is far superior for modeling once you get used to it also.

I've not experienced anything as extreme as what's shown in your gif. It's so bad it looks like snapping is on.

What are the system units for your scene and how big is that teapot? The precision is so poor it's like you're system units are set to miles/kilometers and that teapot is a few cm/inches.

[Anonymous]

What can I say, its absolutely messed up. So much so that we are at a loss of what to do and looking at alternative software.

My system units are in cm, all the rigs and animations are in cm. example, We need to animate godzilla and a car traveling in one go up to 1500 meters.

Now how does anyone expect us to do this when after a 1000 meters I can't move their legs or animate anything on the rig in perspective? Orthographic is out of question since the animators need to see things in perspective camera.

This means the rig gets broken our entire workflow slammed into a brick wall, meanwhile Maya guys are happy animating this sort fo thing for kilometers on end while working in cm system units wihtiout any issues.

I simply don't get how something like this hasn't been fixed since forever, because I tried it on max 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.

No public outcry no burning of flags or buildings over this? How do people work?

Its not only aniamtions its anything to do with placing as well, imagine you have to popuylate a city and you need to place a building or two 800 meters here and 1000 meters there in perspective. Goodluck doing that.

[senorpablo]

I created a scene with the units and scale you mention and I get the same snapping in perspective view. I did observe that the poor precision only appears on the axis that are distant from the origin, which confirms to me it's definitely a precision issue. Not sure why it's only a problem with perspective views, but like I said, I've had issues with modeling in perspective view forever. I've never seen it that bad, but I've never worked at that scale and I never use perspective views to work in for similar reasons. I only use perspective for previewing progress occasionally.

Perspective view sucks for precision. I'm as amazed as you that it's never been addressed, but I guess I just learned to avoid the issues a long time ago by working in user view and have never looked back. I'm a modeler primarily, not an animator, and so there are other advantages to working in orthographic view.

There's zero precision issues in a user/orthographic view at your example units and scale. If you're not familiar with Max, you may not realize that you can have a user/orthographic view aligned to any arbitrary angle, just like a perspective view. 'U' is the shortcut for user view(ortho), and you can quickly toggle between 'P'erspective, 'U'ser, and 'C'amera while you work to avoid precision issues. If you're not willing to try to work that way while animating, you're probably going to have to work closer to the origin if you want to do this work in Max.

Good luck to you.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Seno,

Not new to Max been a max user for over 25 years, but we never had to animate anything this far off origin (which is not really too far off) until now. We had cities build but we worked around this issue by scaling everything down and then up again, however thats easy to do on static meshes but no way to work it on rigs and animations. 

It is sad and frustrating to see this happen, forcing the animators switch from Ortho to perspective to move a joint every time, will have the animators kill me.

I am deeply frustrated with Autodesk's utter neglect of this problem to say the least. 

[senorpablo]

One idea that may or not be practical for your project, is to link your entire scene to a dummy object, so that you can reposition everything but maintain the relative positions and motion. That way, the animations you're working on are always near enough to the origin that precision isn't an issue.

[Anonymous]

Isn't it funny that to this day you are the only person discussing the problem here? Autodesk is silent as usual.

Yet they call 3ds max an architecture program when it can't even place buildings and people at the same time above 500 meters from origin point!

Incredible.

[jon.bell]

Hi @Anonymous,

In general, working with extreme scene scales or objects very far away from the world origin can be problematic in 3ds Max. If possible, I advise moving the entirety of your scene elements so that their "bounding box center" is over the 3ds Max origin. (I've also seen issues where the majority of a customer's scene is clustered around the origin, but a single spurious object, or even detached vertices or a helper hundreds of thousands of units, away can mess up the viewport display.)

However, there are other reasons that you may be experiencing these viewport issues, including:

1. Older GPU drivers (if using Nvidia cards, try to download the latest Studio drivers and install those)
2. Certain input device drivers, such as the 3D Connexion Space Mouse, Wacom tablets or Wacom Cintiqs. Make sure to download and install the latest drivers for these as well. If not using these devices, remove them and uninstall their drivers.
3. Remote desktop drivers for VPN or DisplayLink drivers for laptop docking stations can cause issues, so please check for these.
4. In some cases, turning off the Viewcube and Load Plugins when Used (Customize menu > Files tab) can help viewport performance as well.
5. Adjust the Viewport Clipping -- To set the Viewport Clipping option, navigate to the Viewport Perspective dropdown > Viewport Clipping > then adjust the yellow slider on the right hand side if objects are being cut off or are flickering in the viewports. (This needs to be done for every camera in the scene.)

Please let us know if this helps, and ping me directly if you want me to test some files for you in-house. Thanks!

[pokoy]

With centimeters as scene units that's 150 000 cm away from scene origin. This is way beyond what Max can handle without imprecisions. Typically, whatever unit you are in (scene units, NOT display units), Max will only work fine up to the 3000-4000 units area (negative and positive), anything beyond that will increasingly become less accurate.

Anytime you start a project you need to think about scene extents and set your scene units respectively. With meters, you can go into single millimeter range without imprecisions so working in meters would have been the better choice for your project.

Yes, it's a long standing problem and so far with no solution is in sight. A fix would not only involve the viewport but every single controller and transform parameter in Max. Plus a team effort and time frame that Autodesk is not willing to appoint to 3ds Max from what we can see in the last years.

[senorpablo]

---

@pokoy wrote:

With centimeters as scene units that's 150 000 cm away from scene origin. This is way beyond what Max can handle without imprecisions. Typically, whatever unit you are in (scene units, NOT display units), Max will only work fine up to the 3000-4000 units area (negative and positive), anything beyond that will increasingly become less accurate.

Anytime you start a project you need to think about scene extents and set your scene units respectively. With meters, you can go into single millimeter range without imprecisions so working in meters would have been the better choice for your project.

Yes, it's a long standing problem and so far with no solution is in sight. A fix would not only involve the viewport but every single controller and transform parameter in Max. Plus a team effort and time frame that Autodesk is not willing to appoint to 3ds Max from what we can see in the last years.

---

I generally agree with what you've said regarding choosing appropriate units for you project. However, in this case, that's not the issue. At the units you, and the original poster are talking about, it's purely the perspective viewport that's the issue. I created a scene at the exact same scale, and using the User/Ortho viewport there are zero issues with precision. Max has plenty of precision at those magnitudes, other than object manipulation in a perspective view. 

You can use the Max system units to tell you what the precision at various units and distances from the origin will be. In the case of centimeters and at a distance of 150,000 from the origin, the precision is .015625cm. That's roughly two human hairs. That's not the issue he's experiencing. 

[Anonymous]

@senorpablo

This is 100% correct, this doesn't seem at all like a precision issue in the core sense but rather an issue with the perspective viewport and the way it handles mouse pointers perhaps.

To prove the point further, if you change the preferences of the Gizmos from "intersection" to "projection" the snapping issue goes away but now you can't really move anything accurately in the viewport as described by that method.

Every other software we know of has no issue dealing with centimeter unit scale this far off origin (which is not really that far off) that includes Maya!

I wonder why and when Autodesk can realize this very very grave problem and look into it properly.

[Anonymous]

@jon.bell 

Thanks for taking the time to have a look at my post, unfortunately the methods you suggested are not the issue here as stated below your post by others.

Two notes:

1 - This seems to be a precision issue in the perspective viewport and not in Max core.

2- working with cm scale on this scale should not be an issue in any 3d application (and it isn't, that includes Maya) in Maya you can work cm scale for 10's of kilometers without a hint of an issue. And Max is supposed to be the one for Architecture here according to the buzz out there, so how can an architecture oriented software mess up within 2 kilometer range while Maya can do ten times that scale without any issues. Don't they render cities in Max? 

3 - I hope you can inform the team at Autodesk to fix this issue ASAP, I can assure you that things like these which can cause entire productions to break down are starting to be the last straws breaking many camels backs,  the frustration and helplessness by such unexpected and decades long standing issues of this vital importance are causing many artists and long time users to now seriously consider alternatives to Autodesk line of products. 

[arqrenderz]

I really want to bump this thread, max perspective viewport could HELP the artists a lot with a better handling of larger scenes !

[godrejwoodscapess]

good information

[phani_gurram]

Do you have working knowledge. dont give suggistions like a road side hardware person its very serius issue check it once from your side or come to me with remore desktop i will demonstrate you 

[Diffus3d]

@phani_gurram this thread is 4 years old, please make a new thread if you are having issues.  Jon is retired now so he won't get your message. 

Best Regards,