Bad geometry

[glorybound]

has anybody ever had geometry that was bad? Nothing will stick to it; displacement, multiscatter, autograss, nothing. I imported, exported, merged...!

[Morne]

Not sure what you mean.
As in you add displacement, then after a while it's gone? Or as in you can't add anything to it?

[glorybound]

I can add things to the stack, but the geometry isn't effected my the modifier. So, it doesn't displace, or anything else. It's Revit geometry, which is always a pain. When I convert things to a poly, elements fly out in space, windows rotate; it's madness!

[Morne]

could you post a zipped scene/object so we can take a look?

[Pixelcon]

Revit geometry can sometimes behave really oddly. I always with every piece of revit geom, reset x-form and apply a new UVW map to it.

Revit always seems to work in inches regardless of what the unit setup is in revit or max, so UVW and therefor displacement will be scaled incorrectly, unless you're also working in inches in max (i guess).

Always use scene hold before you reset xform on revit geom as sometimes it can fly out into space.

[trixian]

The issue is actually max's insane idea to import block definitions even though max doesn't natively have them (we use instanced copys). You will often see that by selecting a piece of geometry, and then hit page-up, you select its invisible parent, often defined as a block in its name. These blocks have completely screwed up transform matrices, so any transform will be really weird. Usually one should be able to just unlink any geometry from its parent, but you will then see that objects might jump about and rescale in a random manner. Even worse, since Max doesn't really support these block definitions, they are not classified as helpers or anything, so the only way of selecting only them and not the child geo is by name.
You'd think Autodesk would be able to get this right seeing as they own each respective app, but obviously not.
That being said, I have had a lot more success recently with the newest max and Revit using the send to 3dsmax function in Revit. You might still be having unit issues though.

[mcnamex]

i've always clean up all these block imports class to avoid any surprises, plus it is a great way to tell geometry is linked to a master revit dummy. At least about 1 hr exercise

[tooves]

Have you tried DWG Cleanup script?

It kills all the block hierarchies that can import with the geometry (if you import it with hierarchies).

As others have said, after importing and running DWG Cleanup, Reset X-Form (followed by collapsing the stack, obviously) will often help as sometimes imported geometry comes in with messed up transforms.