Scene xref

[matramurena]

To make my presentations my procedure is as follows:

1) I make the room including our furniture in Acad 2008. This works just fine, and everything is in scale and all the measurements are correct. When the customer actually make the order, all I have to do is to set up some layouts and I have good working drawings.

2) Then I import this file into max 9
3) Next I xref a scenein which are all my objects to make the scene look nice, a pc-screen, hospital chairs, etc etc. All the materials etc will be xreffed as well, so it's a really quick way to set up the scene.

However, I have one big problem doing this. When I Xref the scene it is being placed on the 0,0,0 spot. I'm just not able to move the objects I want to the desired places, let alone cloning them... This I can only do when I "merge" the scenes (in the xref dialogue thingie you get when xreffing a scene) and when I do that I loose any changes I might wanna make to the xreffed scene. Does anyone know how to do this so that the changes I make in the xreffed scene are actually picked up by my current scene??

Hope I made myself a bit clear on this subject.... Darn english..... :)

[Cad64]

In Max, Xrefs are not accessible for editing. If you need to edit your Xref, you have to open the Xref file to make your changes.

If you want your xref to update in your current file automatically when changes are made to it. Be sure to check the "Automatic" box in the "Xref Scenes" dialog.

[matramurena]

OK, so I really need to merge the xref to be able to place it on the right place?

[Cad64]

I've heard that you can bind the xref to a parent object or a dummy object, which is supposed to allow you to move the xref around in the scene, but I've never tried doing it. You might want to give that a shot. I'll give it a try later, but now I'm off to work. Good luck.

Post back if you figure it out.

[DavidB]

just Xref OBJECT instead of scene. Scene in 3ds max refer to unmovable objet. if you use XREF object , it will appear at 0,0,0but you can move it after.

hope that help.

[Cad64]

Thanks for the tip. I usually just Xref Scene, but it looks like Xref Object may be more useful. :D

[matramurena]

Thanx! I dunno why I never tried that before....