[Mr Whippy]

I've always been confused by the scene scale, even in the early days of Maxwell. My fall back was to set 3DS Max to use metres, but even then I wasn't sure if Maxwell was seeing 1 Max metre as 1 Maxwell metre.

Anyway, I'm now working on a project again and am re-visiting this issue. I like to use generic units and model in what is essentially cm.

So my 1 metre long item is 100 max units long.


If I export the MXS and then load it in Maxwell Studio, is the object information display in the top left of the screen in metres?


Right now my 8m x 8m x 3m box is appearing in Maxwell, with a scene 'scale' factor of 0.393, at ~ 8 x 8 x 3 'Maxwell' units.

I take it that I am correct in assuming then, that my scale factor of 0.393 from 3DS Max is adjusting my 800 units to 314.4 'other units' which Maxwell then see's as 8 'Maxwell units' which I assume are metres?


Any help much appreciated. The documentation on this seems rather light and there is no sure-fire way in scene to to check scale.


Thanks

Dave

[Mihnea Balta]

When you set Max to use generic units in the Units Setup dialog, everything you see in the UI (and type in) is in system units. Press the "System Unit Setup" button to see what the system unit is and change it (I'm assuming it's inches in your case).

The plug-in will transform all the distances from the system unit to meters. Studio displays meters in its UI. If you want to work in centimeters, set centimeters as the system unit and everything will work automatically. The global scene scale factor is there mainly as a quick fix for scenes which are not modeled to scale, you don't need to use it in every scene.

When Max is set to use metric or US units in the units setup dialog, it converts all the distances to the system unit internally before passing them to us. The plug-in then converts from the system unit to meters on export (as above), so essentially the UI units will be converted to meters. Again, this will work automatically, you don't need to touch the global scene scale.

[Mr Whippy]

Oh ok, so in 3DS Max the generic units are the system units.

The Maxwell 'scene scale' then scales from, in my case, 800 > 314 inches, or about 8 metres.


All these years and I never knew 3DS Max generic units == system units anyway


Many thanks for that Mihnea!


Dave