Pan and Zoom Goes Really Fast

[Anonymous]

Hello. Ive been using 3DS Max for about 3 hours now, and seem to be picking up on it very quickly (Props to everyone involved for user friendliness). Im just puzzled about one thing. In my perspective viewport, panning and zooming happen realy fast, zooming close is impossible, as it zooms through and past the object with one scroll-notch. All zooming in other viewports are just fine, its only perspective that I'm having an issue with. Hope I described that in enough detail 🙂 Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

EDIT: Never mind, I was messing arround and some how it fixed itself 😕 Anyone know what was causing that so I dont have the issue in the future?

[timd1971]

Something about the scale units or something? Real pain in the a$$. Just ANOTHER important thing still left UNfixed after many versions.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I use to have similar problems until I realised that the scale I was working to was tiny so whenever I tried to pan around something it would pan way too quickly. A way I got around this was to always make sure you've got whatever your panning around selected. That seemed to work for me.

Regards with the zooming, select your object and press 'Z' it will zoom in so the object takes up the whole viewport size and then zooming using the mouse scroll works a lot better.

Hope this helped!

[Anonymous]

Another thing to check is the selections in the lower right...use these to pan and zoom if you are having trouble.

[Anonymous]

I use to have similar problems until I realised that the scale I was working to was tiny so whenever I tried to pan around something it would pan way too quickly. A way I got around this was to always make sure you've got whatever your panning around selected. That seemed to work for me.

Regards with the zooming, select your object and press 'Z' it will zoom in so the object takes up the whole viewport size and then zooming using the mouse scroll works a lot better.

Hope this helped!

Thanks! Now I don't have to worry about that anymore 🙂

[Steve_Curley]

Yes, you do, because clearly your scene scale is way off for the size of objects you're creating. Many things in Max require that objects are created to scale and will not work correctly if they are not.

[Anonymous]

You're welcome! 🙂

[Anonymous]

But if he's creating something that is small when it's too scale at least now he knows. I've recently just modelled a plug which is obviously quite small and the techniques I said worked fine when I was panning around and zooming.

[Anonymous]

if you find that your scroll wheel is zooming too much another thing that you can do if the Z key trick isnt working enough to is go to the top of Max's tool bar and go to Customize -> Preferences - > Viewport tab, in there is a section to the bottom right for mouse control. You can reduce the wheel zoom increment to a lower number. (try cutting it in half) I also normally have checked on Zoom about mouse for both perspective and ortho, but don't think that is your problem

[Steve_Curley]

Obviously it is scene dependant, but in general you want the Scene scale roughly in the middle of the range of object sizes you'll be using.
If you try to make a 1mm cube when your system scale is set to M then yes it will be to scale, but it would actually be 0.001 units, not 1 unit and it's that difference which causes the pan/zoom problems. Max does not like many decimal places because it uses single precision maths and therefore very large, or very small, dimensions become inaccurate very quickly.

[dexterknight]

At the bottom right of the 3ds max screen, select and hold the pan view fly-out (looks like a hand), and select the 2D Pan Zoom Mode (looks like a hand with a marque-select behind it). This will disable accelerated viewport panning and behave how you would expect while panning. 

[syndicate5]

This is really late in the game but also turning on edged faces helps with this. Almost like Max has an easier time with figuring out that there's geometry there if it runs into more edges while zooming.