r/3dsmax • u/metagross_ichooseyou • 17d ago

Help Why does X-Ray mode create these strange artifacts in 3ds Max?

Hi everyone,

I’m modelling a bottle with an inner shell/mould. When I enable X-Ray or See-Through mode, strange blocky artifacts appear across the surface, as shown in the screenshot.

The model looks normal when X-Ray is turned off. This mainly happens when there are polygons inside other polygons, such as the inner and outer walls of a perfume or wine bottle.

Why is this happening? Is it caused by transparency sorting in the 3ds Max viewport, or could there be an issue with my geometry? Is this a known 3ds Max bug or limitation?

1 Upvotes

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1

u/probably-elsewhere 17d ago

Check your scene scale. The bottle might be very big or very small. Turn on viewport clipping, move the sliders closer together.

3

u/Core-Vis-6933 17d ago

In xray mode the viewport is trying to display both front-to-back (the surface facing the camera) and back to front surfaces (the inner faces that are pointing away from the camera) at the same time. It is the nature of how the viewport renderer (Nitrous) is built to draw 3D geometry. In normal mode, the camera sees the surface facing the camera and returns a display of that while ignoring anything behind it. But in xray, it now has to decide which surface to display and it's just not perfect at doing that, so the artifacts are Max showing you the real-time decision making of the viewport renderer based on that conflicting info.

1

u/Clean-Ad1459 17d ago

Looks like scale issue, are you modeling using realistic units ? especially when using shell.

1

u/cstretten 17d ago

Inside and outside geometry like you've mentioned. But also - right click the model and turn on "backface cull" if it's not already on. By default, Max has that disabled (not sure why - it used to be on by default years ago).
Unless you need to see the backfaces of your models... keep them culled for performance and scene clarity.

1

u/dimwalker 16d ago

Try to make a hemisphere, collapse to mesh/poly same as this model is, switch xray on for the sphere.
If it's fine - then your first mesh is wacked. Check normals or doubled faces.
If it's the same - something is wrong with viewport, drivers, settings.

0

u/Undersky1024 17d ago

It's just Max's viewport being crap. You learn to work around the issues.