i’m building a turret of sorts with movable arms. after finishing modeling, i moved the arm’s pivots the center to begin animating. when i tried to rotate the arms, however, the began distorting strangely.

i think i accidentally hit a hotkey and changed some setting, but i don’t know what it is. anyone know how to fix this?

Rough guess - you scaled the object(s) at the Object level (rather than at a sub-object level like Vertex). This is not a good idea. Try applying a Reset XForm (on the Utility Panel) - that should fix it, with any luck. If it doesn’t, zip the scene and attach it to a post so we can take a look.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

the Reset XForm utility unfortunately did not work.

i neglected to mention that the two arms were linked to the center barrel. upon further experimentation i found that unlinking the arms solved the problem. i would like to keep them linked, though, so attached is the scene so you can take a look at it.

thanks for the help.

	Attachment
turret.zip

Yep - it’s a scaling issue alright. Select any of the objects while you have “Select and Uniform Scale” selected and you’ll see that the scaling is not 100-100-100 (as per Spacefrog’s reply) even with the Reset XForm.

Delete RightArm01 (because it goes wrong when you collapse the stack).
Unlink RightArm from CenterArm.
Select RightArm and collapse the stack, then apply the Reset XForm, then collapse again.
Do the same to CenterArm.
Recreate RightArm01, then link the outside arms to the CenterArm.

Be careful using the Mirror tool to recreate RightArm01 - it works by Scaling along an axis which will reintroduce the problem you just fixed, use a Mirror Modifier instead.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

thanks, guys. i didn’t know the mirror tool worked with negative scaling. works perfectly now.

thanks again. :)

Hi All,
I am having a similar such issue, i am doing the Dreadnought tutorial off 3d palace (http://www.3d-palace.com/2010/04...-max-the-dreadnought-set/) and have gotten to a stage where i am creating some pistons for the legs.

The idea is there are 2 parts of the pistons, and when you move the leg the piston using some lookat constrants moves as you would expect…

So far this has gone according to plan but on the 3rd set of pistons i am getting distoring whenever i rotate the object while it is linked to the rest of the leg… The Scale is all 100’s, i have reset the xform, i have reset the pivot point, if i unlink it everything is fine but as soon as i link it back to the leg it messes up again… Any ideas?

Thanks

Scaling follows the link hierarchy, from the top down, so if any item above it is scaled, that scaling will end up being applied to the object you are linking.
Try unlinking all the items and find out which one has the scaling problem.
As with the earlier problem in this thread, if you can’t fix it with a reset xform on the problem object, zip the scene and attach it so someone can take a look.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

that hopefully should be the fix… unfortunately the culprit item is pretty much the most important part in the model so far and everything is linked to it… will take a fair bit of fixing… Strange in my years of modellin as a hobby i have never known how distructive the scale button is… you would think i would have found this out sooner.

I’m afraid it’s one of those things most people learn the hard way, but once learned is rarely forgotten.

Either scale at the sub-object level (normally vertices), or apply an XForm modifier and scale its Gizmo.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Why normally vertices and not ctrl+a any of the other modes?