Preserved Topic: Rogue polygon in 3D SM

Okay, so I spent all this time building some terrain by hand. Vertex by vertex, face by face. But I accidently put 2 faces on the same set of vertices. I know this because it's causing problems down the road. Is there an easy way of ferreting-out the extra face?

Another problem I've caused is putting 3 faces on 4 vertices when there should only be two faces. But that's easy enough to spot and fix.

In the mean-time, I'll be deleting faces one at a time, find it, re-load, and re-delete.

I'm just curious if there is an easier way to do this in 3DS Max.

edit: Took less than 5 min. Ahhh... nothing like crafting things by hand. I love it! Making terrain by hand -- that cracks me up. But I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't know if that makes me old-fashioned or a purist. Time to digress.


[This message has been edited by warjournal (edited 06-20-2001).]

Heh. Export DXF, Import DXF, delete extra faces. I think, but I haven't tried it. Rather hunt them down by hand since I'm not working on anything too big.


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I, Warjournal, Techincal-Slop Author Extraordinaire.

There is a facility in MAX called 'Find Holes' or 'Locate Errors' or something like that. Look it up under the 'Learning 3D Studio MAX' help file. It should be able to locate your extraneous polygon for you.




In the beginning, there was the word...and the word was 'God', although by the time it reached the other end of the phone line... the word was 'Gznd'

'face errors'

Duh!

STL-Check seems to do the trick.

WJ: Do you often answer you own question out loud?

everybody needs a swamp bear

When an epiphany strikes, "Duh!" is the first thing out of my mouth. What I really hate is when a puzzle comes together in my mind's eye -- right after going to bed. Get out of bed and fire it up. When I finally figured out how to make a serrated saw with multi-stroking, I was 2 hours away from PS. Those 2 hours were 2 of the longer hours of my life.

This time around I can't believe I didn't think of checking the on-line reference. Skaarj set me straight on this one. Thanks, man.

I've got some other issues with Max that have been bothering me *forever*. I'll continue my own R&D. When I reach my wits-end, I'll post.

Okay, now seems like a good time for one.

When I pan/zoom/rotate, everything is suddenly represented by it's bounding box. I don't like that. I want things to display as is while pan/zoom/rotate. It's a real pain trying to get a viewport just right. I have been pouring and pouring over tons of text and I can't find hide-nor-hair of how to change the viewport display while p/z/r.

Any ideas? Or will I have to continue living with this?

quote:

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When I pan/zoom/rotate, everything is suddenly represented by it's bounding box. I don't like that. I want things to display as is while pan/zoom/rotate. It's a real pain trying to get a viewport just right. I have been pouring and pouring over tons of text and I can't find hide-nor-hair of how to change the viewport display while p/z/r.

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Degradation override. Looking at the bottom of the Max window (assuming you're using Max4), to the right of mid-screen, you'll see some state buttons. They are (from left to right), 'keyboard shortcut override', 'crossing

Of course. One of those little buttons that I pressed all those months ago without bothering to finding out what it does. The really funny thing is that all my research almost always led to the topic of Degradation.

I'll say it again, 3D progs have changed a lot since I left the scene. One of these days I might write a rant. Like, what's up with this one-sided polygon crap? That one threw me for one hell of loop. I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Max R3.0, but I'm not complaining. Price was big factor for this one.

Thanks, Das. Maybe someday I'll be doing something big enough to where degradation will be useful.

WIth a modern video card, you'll rarely need to turn off the override even for very complex scenes. I'm using a GeForce2 GTS and I've never turned off the degradation override.

It was a useful feature when many people used 'Heidi Software' as the interactive render option, but even cheap gaming cards are very powerful for viewport display in 3D apps these days.