Troubleshooting

This topic lists solutions to common problems you might experience while using Civil View.

Viewport performance is poor.	Work in wireframe mode wherever possible and use bounding box display when the scene contains objects with complex meshes such as vehicles. When you make extensive use of surface tracking, consider baking the animation to a simple series of XYZ points, thus removing the "resource-hungry" relationship between placed objects and their respective parent shapes and surfaces.
I can't load an Object Placement Style.	Check that there are no references to object INI files that are no longer present on your system.
Civil View Explorer or 3ds Max viewports fail to refresh.	Right-click any item in the upper portion of the Civil View Explorer panel and choose Refresh. This will refresh and reset both the active viewport and the Civil View Explorer panel.
DXF files take a long time to import.	Some applications such as MX tend to create very large DXF files. Try importing an MX generated DXF file into "vanilla" 3ds Max, then re-export it back to DXF immediately. You should find that the resulting file, although identical in contents to the original, will be less than half the size, and will import into 3ds Max / Civil View in a fraction of the time. For even better results, avoid the use of DXF files altogether, and use GENIO or LandXML files instead.
Cameras shake and vehicles wobble in drive-through animations.	This can be caused by one of two problems: A large world coordinate system is causing lateral camera and vehicle movement, because of roundoff error. Make sure to specify global shift values so your model is situated on a local coordinate system with an origin as close to the 3ds Max origin as possible. The parent shape contains a large number of points, causing points in close proximity to generate changes of bearing in animated objects. This can happen especially with MX models. As much as possible, reduce the number of points in the parent shape. The easiest way to do this is to apply a Normalize Spline modifier to the parent shape.
In viewports, sign plate bitmaps appear on both sides of sign objects.	Civil View uses double-sided materials on parametric signs, so the sign bitmap appears only on the front of the sign plate. 3ds Max viewports don't fully support double-sided material display, but when you render the scene, the signs will appear correctly.
Objects created in the Object Placement Style Editor are generated at the wrong scale. ... or ... Objects created in the Object Placement Style Editor are not visible in the viewport even though the Civil View Explorer panel indicates that the objects are actually there.	This is caused by the wrong system unit setting being selected in 3ds Max. If you wish to work in meters, for example, it is crucial to set the 3ds Max system units to meters. (The default system unit setting is inches.) Warning: Change the system unit value before you import or create geometry. Do not change the system unit in an existing scene.