Object disappeared in viewport

[iannnah]

Hello,

I'm new to 3ds Max. I'm learning to model a lamp. I can't remember which key I pressed, the object is kinda disappeared in the viewport. Could anyone give me some suggestions on this? I have attached a file for reference too. Thank you.

[Stefan_L · Accepted solution]

Simply activate the perspective view by hovering over/clicking on it, press "T" for top view and "P" for perspective again.
Dunno what caused this, but there are bulletprrof ways to mess up the perspective viewport in MAX2017...

[iannnah]

It happens when I scale parts of the object. The file acts normal when I re-open it, its weird...

[Anonymous]

try . select all , right click on mouse, pick unhide all,

or restart your program..

check this, might be you would like it

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @iannnah and welcome to the community,

I have to agree with @Stefan_L that pressing T, then P, then Z fixes it right out.  I do wonder what you're hitting to make this happen so I can log it, but the viewport is getting broken somehow.  I wonder... are you on the latest service pack?  Thanks for any information. 

I'm going to mark Stefan's post as the solution because it does fix it, but any extra information you can give me is appreciated.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi Alfred,

 I am getting the exact same problem, but it usually happens in orthographic view. There is no specific key that triggers it as far as I know. Sometimes it looks like the model is slowly disappearing, and then boom.. nothing in the viewport except a small x, z or a y inside of a small yellow square. I tried zooming in, but that's not working. Going into left, top or any other view and then going back into orthographic from there fixes the problem, but it gets very very very annoying.

My program is up to date as far as I know. Do you know what the problem might be?

Thank you

Eugene

[Anonymous]

I have the same issue. The workaround of Stefan_L works just for a short period of time. Nearly every command of any kind triggers this strange behavior. It's really annoying. Happend to me with the 2017th version and now with 2018, too. Hard to say how to avoid it. Sometimes I have no problems at all, and sometimes it happens nearly every command. Please help!

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous and @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

I've been in training all week so I apologize for the late reply.  The developers have been asking for scenes which display this problem in case something inside the scenes are causing these problems.  If you need the scenes to stay secret I can create a private folder for you and I am happy to do so, just say the word.  Any scenes, even super simple ones, with the problem would be greatly appreciated.  

Would you be able to record a screencast of this happening for me too, please?  

Thank you very much for doing that if you can.  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi Alfred,

It took a while for me to get the program to misbehave like it did, but this morning it finally (unfortunately) happened again. I wasn’t doing anything special, just making one of the objects active and panning around the object.

I have done a screen capture video for you, so if you have like a Dropbox or some other way for me to send it through to you because its too large for an Email?

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thank you very much @Anonymous,

I have set up a private folder for you if you'd like to upload your files there. You should get an email about it shortly, and if you don't see it please check your SPAM folder. These files are private and will not be shared with anyone but yourself and the support staff. Please let me know if you have any questions. Please use at least an 8 character password or the Box account may not work properly. Once you have uploaded your files, please post a comment here or send me a PM so I know to check the Box account. 

You can also attach things to forum posts up to 70MB I believe.  Or, you can PM me a link to the file on whatever host you prefer.  Thanks!

Best Regards,

[DigiTal0n]

Do any of you have a 3d-connexion "navigator" plugged in? I almost couldn't live without one myself. But, from the description, it sounds like you have a key sticking or something causing it to zoom out of view. I have seen that same thing happen in the classroom when someone inadvertently lowers the monitor or rests a book on the navigator or keyboard accidentally. The solution listed above certainly takes care of it (T, P, Z), but just something to check. I have had to unplug one of the navigators and restart the computer and plug it back in in the past because one of the sensors in the navigator itself was stuck a little. 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thanks for the video.  This helps a lot.  If you disable the viewcube, this problem should stop happening to you.  This is a known issue with many notes in the tracker.  Can you please try that for me?

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

.

[graham3D4DT]

Pressing T then P works except... As soon as I try to orbit the scene in the perspective window, the scenbe dissapears!!!

Something funny also happens to the viewcube.

(Its a real mess up with Mental Ray gone. I am having to reinstall V 2017 fopr my old files to translate the mental ray to Vray, so I can then usethem in V 2019. And now I am having glitches like this. Is there a quick way to convert Mental ray files (with Proxies) to Vray?)

[Anonymous]

This worked for me. Thank you so much.

[blpjoel]

Viewcube disable doesn't fix the issue.  Seems to be about the way max calls draw updates to the video card.

I am on a RTX5000/P5000 Machine with latest drivers, so my cards are top of the line and it still happens.

Turning off "Improve Quality Progressively" under Viewport Configuration fixed the issue on my machine.  I guess I don't need that anyway since these cards can handle anything.

[blpjoel]

Update:  Problem returned.  Still have issue despite turning off viewcube and progressive display.  Not sure what it is, would love to have an autodesk engineer do a screen sharing session with me to do some advanced troubleshooting.

[blpjoel]

SOLUTION FOUND!

Hi smarter people than me...
I am on latest max, 2020.1.  Using a 72Core machine with tons of ram and an RTX5000 and a P5000.  The monitor is hooked up to the RTX.  All day I've been troubleshooting an issue and think I am finally onto the problem.
  
Basically, I have a heavyish scene with lots of sub objects, ~5M polys.  When I stop moving the viewport it locks for a millisecond and then objects disappear.  It seems to affect the shaded view only, wire is fine.  It occurs in high quality, clay, or standard mode.  I've tried updating windows, the nvidia drivers (using clean install option), checking scene bounds, checking pivots, and isolated vertices.  I tried rolling back to older drivers.  I tried importing my objects into a fresh max. I tried disabling the view cube too.  All according to some previous posts.

No Luck.  Things still disappear and viewport doesn't refresh correctly.

Then it occured to me maybe it isn't the viewport/driver really, but something in the viewport that is miscalculating and glitching it out.  So I wiped the materials on all my objects and it was perfect.  So I narrowed it down to be a material issue... but what?!

So then, I cloned my material, a multi-sub with 7 parts, and went at them a part at a time.  Turns out, it is the BUMP channel.  I have a removed that and all is fine.  I had a vrayComposite with both Edges and a standard procedural Noise, in it.  So i removed that and tried them one at a time to see.  Turns out the procedural noise in the bump channel was the culprit.  Doesn't seem to do it with checker or bitmap.  So I switched my procedural to a map and used Triplanar and it fixes it completely.  

So what appeared to be a bad driver issue, turns out to be some odd bug linked to a procedural mapped to a bump channel.

Pretty frickin strange.  Someone needs to see if they can create a replicable scene and try this solution. and someone has to figure out if it is NVIDIA or AUTODESK that has the bug.

[jon.bell]

Hi BLPJoel,

I just wanted to revisit this thread to see if you had any updates on this issue, or if using the latest video drivers for your GPU and/or the latest version of 3ds Max had addressed this.

Please let us know, and we hope to hear from you soon!

[blpjoel]

Haven't had the issue since.  For what it's worth.  I haven't investigated further.