Material Scaling Issue

[rusteberg]

What's causing this? Same exact material in two different scenes.... Any ideas?

[rusteberg]

never mind...... i didn't realize this was a button (banging head on desk)

[dean_dmoo]

I find it quite annoying that max doesn't seem to have a system to "sort" this out. I've gone from millimeters (display and system) to cm's (display and system) and I come across these elements from time to time. I've had to redo scenes made in mm's and xref-ed in a cm scene as a 5mm size becomes a 5cm size. Usually found in Railclone elements.

Maybe it's just my logic, but surely the system unit set-up should be either metric of imperial and you can then choose the display scale.

I must be missing some reason why it's usefull....

[Alex_M]

AFAIK this is because Max is still single-precision. So you have to chose your units before starting with your scene. This also causes problems when merging scenes using different units. If it were double-precision it would be possible to chose whatever units mid-project without problems. I think it would impact display/calculation performance to use double-precision so this might be why AD decided to stick with it even though it introduces some problems, some of which also being unable to create big scenes properly in mm and cm units or small scenes in meters/kilometers.

[kosso_olli]

There are some excellent videos for this in the 3dsMax learning channel. It all makes sense, and I don't want to miss it. You just have to grasp the concept behind the way it is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPc02tZzj8c

Part 02 explains how to correctly merge file with different units .

[mitviz]

well its actually really simple, system units have to be set before any project, if you work in cm set system units to cm, if you work in inches or feet set it to inches or feet, for small scenes set it to cm if you use cm and for large scene set it to meters, if your imperial just set it to feet. thats only the system units, now the display units is really different, it just tells max to convert your system units and show them as any other unit you prefer, so for example, if you had a box in a scene and you set system units to cm and the box measures 25 x 25 x 25cm, if you set the display unit scale to cm also you will see in max that the box measures 25x25x25cm as well but if you for example set the display units to mm you will see 250x250x250mm in max, or if you set the display units to inches you will see 9.84 x 9.84 x 9.84inches. so have the option to basically use the display units as conversion to anything you want but the system units are the most important and you cannot change it once you start the project, if you do, you will have to manually scale up or down all the models in your scene to fit the new system units so try to avoid that, its a pain in the ass but, long explanation and i hope someone got it but i get this question a million and one times, over and over people ask me about it