Wire Parameters unavailable/greyed out - Help!

[Anonymous]

Hello Autodesk community! This is my first post in here and I am excited to own a student licensed Autodesk 3DS Max Design 2015 - software

However! I ran into weird problem i have not ran into before. I wanted to start by modelling a windmill, which i would then animate, but I cant start doing this because for some reason i cant access the wire parameter options.

I also tried to access it from the Toolbar -> Animation -> Wire Parameters -> Parameter Wire Dialog but everything is greyed out in there too. I have provided screenshots of this problem.

Thanks in advance,

Nikita

[Steve_Curley]

I wonder if you managed to change the default contollers.
Command Panel > Motion tab > expand the Assign Cotroller rollout. You should see PositionXYZ, EulerXYZ, Bezier Float (for the Position, Rotation and Scale respectively). If not, let us know and we can tell you how to put them right. If they are correct then you may need to post the scene (zipped!) for us to look at.

[Anonymous]

Hi Steve!

I see PositionXYZ, EulerXYZ and Bezier Scale in the Assign controller parameters.

[Steve_Curley]

Can you Zip the scene and attach it to a reply then we can take a look.

[Anonymous]

The Zip file size exceeded the 5,24mb limit by few kilobytes, so i uploaded it to a third party host service.

Scene Zip File

[Steve_Curley · Accepted solution]

Simple answer - don't use Groups.
Long answer....

First, your System Units are Inches but your Display Units are Meters. Not good. If you're working in Metric then at the very least the System Units should also be Metric, and preferably the same units. Meters are quite big for something that size, I'd be tempted to use cm - that way the smaller details are much easier to work with. Note that you can't simply change the units - it's rather more involved than that, unless you set them up before adding anything to the scene.

Groups. Bad. Don't - especially if you're intending to animate.
Ungroup everything.
Select everything, Command Panel > Utilities tab > Reset XForm.
Change the System Units (NOT the Display units which can go to either cm or generic) to cm.
Utilities > Rescale World Units. Select Scene and 2.54 because your Units are inches and there's 2.54cm to the Inch.
Using the Select and Link tool, link each Sail to its support, link the 3 supports to Cylinder002, link Gear003 to Cylinder002. Similarly, link the crushing stone to gear002 and cylinder001 to gear002. You should then be able to animate the main spindle (cylinder002) and use the wire params between Cylinder002 (X rotation) to gear002 (Z rotation) to get the effect you want.

Some things are not exactly horizontal/vertical - may be by design, but if not you should probably sort those out before doing the Reset XForm (if they're animated, the other stuff doesn't matter so much).

[Anonymous]

Oh gosh, I thought that Display units was all there was. I did how you told me and the Wire Parameters option became available again. I also fixed the pivots of objects and now the result is exactly like i wanted. I now also realize the problematic way of thinking when grouping objects instead of linking them.

Thanks!

[Steve_Curley]

Better to learn about such things now, when you're just starting out, than later when it might really matter 🙂