I realise it will likely be different depending upon where you live (US/UK for instance) but I’d be interested to know.
We have system units in meters as we have found with large projects we get errors if we have them set to mm. However, in Max2014 (and 2013) we have errors with the garment modifier when working in this way.
What do you do?
i used to work in meters because of a freaky viewport with mm and large scenes. had some accuracy issues with m so switched to cm, works fine
So do you have any issues working with cm? Its just not the unit I have been trained to think in. For me (as an architect) I’m mm all the way, and that’s the unit we worked in until large scenes caused major issues. After that its meters. But cm??? Yuck! I think I read somewhere that Max was ‘designed’ to work in cm, but I don’t understand that. Surely it shouldn’t matter to Max. But recent exercises with garment maker suggest otherwise.
haha, yuck indeed, for some reason it doesn’t feel right, but max digs it, i’ve had no issues so far.
dot and comma decimal symbol however is a nightmare these days, max has gone completely schizo
…and of course you can always set the system units to cm and display units to mm or m
i have no idea if max is designed around cm or not, or why it should matter at all. the “origin” thing probably has something to do with it
I work in meters, but for something like garment, cloth, simulations and detail modeling, i normally do them in cm, and them merge them in the master scene. As long as there are no modifiers that depend on word units (symmetry, renderable spline, push,…) things should go ok, else i collapse everything in the original cm scene so no modifiers go into the meters scene. I also prefer to model in cm or mm, for accuracy details (so i can use perspective when modelling details).
Best regards,
Daniel
Its bloody ridiculous is what it is! Sick of these kind of bugs with Max.
If world units worked ok when merging materials and modifiers… but no :roll:. Things related to object transforms inside max should use “doubles” instead of “floats”, for units or use some other clever method, so one could use mm or cm in masterplans without some much trouble.
Best regards,
Daniel
US here. We work with system units of 1 unit = 1 in and never change it.
When we need to work in mm / cm / m we just adjust the display units and we have never had issues with scale since everything is the same scale, just the units are displayed differently. It may not work for everyone, but it’s been a life saver here when pulling assets from one project to another.
cm with m display works for us. Having it at mm results in viewport display problems when dealing with Masterplan size projects, and m is often too large when dealing with objects at human scale. CM seems to be a good compromise
General projects here is meter system units and mm display units. If I have to do something small like just a chair or bottle I use mm and mm.
Often 3rd party tools suck in this regard as it was developed with cm in mind and if you use anything else you dont get the correct results.
Millimetres for everything here.
mm for (smaller) residential/office projects. m for (bigger) civil projects. Same way clients draw in 2d.
Conforming to reception from clients, so if( well… when) there is changes, no interpretation or questions for anybody. in.. ft.. m.. mm..cm.. never had any problems, except a FBX import glitch that was fixed 2 years ago.
cm here.
I’m in retail shop design industry and also for big projects I used cm that is the best, for me, to represent the stores and the furnitures.
metres here, mm dont really compute for miles of masterplan!
Meters 99% of the time (exteriors). Display units set to whatever suits me, but considering you can just type anything into max’s spinners regardless of units, it does not matter much.
It just depends on what you are working on. Building assets, I set the units to whatever suits it (usually cm, and never mm).
The scene file where everything is assembled is then most likely set to meters.
Scaling of certain maps is the only issue, but it seems less of a problem these days. Not sure if its max 2014 thats fixed a few of these issues, or if plugin devs are getting better at defining sizes properly…
Back in the days where I did tons of pack shots etc, I usually worked in cm.
What really irks me is architects thinking that working in mm is more “precise”, as if typing 450000mm is more precise than 450m. Talk about wasting floating point precision…