Gizmo + World Size / Sizing Error + Solution

Hi stephan, not necessarily a bug - but maybe worth a look in the code perhaps - first time I’ve ran into this (you know I use your software a lot, so me encountering this first time was a surprise). I created tubes with an obscene amount of nodes, unable to count but - a silly amount with unvalidated tubes (using snap point-to-point and squiggling very long lines) Tube tool started to act up, it wasn’t either working (as in, wasn’t creating a new one) - then times it worked, the created tube wasn’t either staying - it would disappear after I made it - if it created fine, and stayed, I then couldn’t access the world radius handler (first dot) - it was only flickering in appearance when I rotated the camera. The other radius handlers were accessible though. I deleted some tubes I made earlier, tried again and it worked fine when I used less nodes. Reason why I suspect the nodes, is because I’ve created models with more Tube assets than this with no hiccups, but not with this amount of nodes before. All in all I was able to create the amount I wanted in the end, but not without encountering these hiccups and just trying over and over until it just, worked.

Thank you for reading!

Update: Actually the Tube count is higher than previous, there was an area of the sculpt I forgot entirely that had a mass of them in, all in all the tube count is very high (maybe 50-60 or so) and node count astronomical.

Update: Now new primitives I’m creating are randomly disappearing also - nothing specific, an example is a Plane I just Inserted, soon as I begin interacting with it with the Gizmo it dissapears.

More bizarreness, cant make primitive at all

@stephomi I might have to send you the file to look at so you can see what ive done - I can’t continue with the sculpt other than adding to what I’ve already created, cloning primitives has the same effect - they just disappear. I physically cannot add anymore to the scene, and it’s not over-loaded with objects either. The only thing I did different this time compared to all my other work was the detail I added in. These problems only arose after I added those last tubes in with lots of nodes (hence my original post). Even after I deleted them, the problem now just persists seemingly indefinitely.

update: I can add a tube and validate it if im quick and I don’t do any adjustments to it pre-validation, just no other primitive - still get some hiccups with the Gizmo, but otherwise I’m hoping I can at least finish the sculpt this way. I won’t further update this anymore for the sake of being pedantic, will leave it in your hands - I’ve e-mailed a copy over bud. Much appreciated for your time in advance.

The coordinates are huge so you hit numerical issues.

There’s no particular bug with the tube tool, any tools can go wrong when you hit numerical limits (I could improve this particular use case to be more robust though).

What’s more important/interesting is to understand how it happened in the first place (something must has gone wrong pretty early in the process, did you start off with the base sphere or imported a big model?).


To see coordinates you can display Log in Debug menu, then Performance → Scene.
Ideally the bound should be more or less centered and the overall range should be reasonable, let’s say [0.001 - 1000.0].

There’s no easy way to fix that.
Maybe it’s possible in Nomad but it’s a pain to explain, basically you need to scale down everything, recenter everything, and make sure to bake the matrix, primitive needs to be validated as well… (otherwise there’s no baking possible)

1 Like

Thank you Stephan - annoyingly after all my tinkering earlier and trying to isolate any error on my part I began to suspect this only because I opened a new scene to try something - made a sphere, instantly saw I had a issue - it created very large - I scaled it down to normal. Afterward I went back into my sculpt, highlighted everything and brought it down in size. Still wasn’t sure though. I will follow your advice to the letter. I have a good understanding now based on your explanation, importantly I know how to avoid this scenario in future - thank you so much for your time & patience my friend. :innocent:

No I scaled it up myself lol, just a regular Tube for the main foundation of the model. I found sometimes this helped with visual distribution of AO (larger world size model compared to small), I did find that caps have been put to stop models from going too big, and the sizing matrix round robins itself - I just think I settled still on something too large (it scaled up/down until I found a sweet spot - but, turns out this wasn’t a sweet spot just messed everything up lol)

When you create a primitive from the scene menu, the primitives are always the same size (width of 1.0) and it’s always centered.

If your model is a billion bigger or smaller, you’ll likely encounter issue (Nomad or elsewhere).

You should adjust the AO value instead.


By merging everything, and simply using the gizmo scale tool I could fix the issue (turned out the model was centered, so no need to toy with translation).

1 Like

Brilliant!! Merci beaucoup my friend, your assistance has been much needed & wholly appreciated. I’ll be spending the evening getting my work back on track, I’m relieved to know it’s fixable! Yeah I need to stop fiddling with world scales so much, rely more on the widgets in Post Processing sometimes lol. :innocent:

Note that if you merge everything you can scale down in one go in the gizmo menu and it looks ok.

I tried and it worked (turned out that even though the mesh is huge, it was already centered, so no need to adjust the translation in this case).

You can enter formula in the manual input to correct the scale precisely.

1 Like

Ahh, I’ve been scaling it down but encountered a few hiccups still, I shall input the precise scale as per instruction! Fantastic! Appreciate the additional time you’re taking to help me, really do. By the looks of it as well, my model looks good at several million polys lower than what I had sculpted it at, which means I can also thoroughly expand on this piece lol. :grin:

Hi Stephan, would you be able to email me back the file you corrected? I’ve been thoroughly repeating the steps on the video, and the results I’m getting are not the same. I used the same zip file I sent you, in the performance log the radius is slightly different, I entered 1.0 / 59151976 (after I merged everything) - still getting the same hiccups as before.

My version was heavily decimated because I was on my iPad Air 4 (only 4gb of ram). I can do it on my desktop but I’d prefer if you manage to do it yourself.

According to your screen you didn’t scale down.

What is happening after you scale down? (Screenshot, or video)
Make sure to write 1.0 and not 1 (otherwise it’s going to do an integer division), the real value doesn’t matter much, you just need to have the order of magnitude correctly.

Also after it’s done just click on the cube to recentrer the camera, then save and restart the app.

ps: note that in some case Nomad decides to transform the vertex instead of the matrix. It was typically the case in my video. That’s why after I entered the value I didn’t have to « bake ». It depends on the value you enter (most of the time, only the matrix should be edited though).

This is what I’m getting dude, some trippy graphical madness toward the end:

You didn’t do what I said!

You should recenter the camera after the scale down (double click on background or click multiple time on the snap cube, or click on mesh name in scene menu).
What you did instead is toying with the gizmo (and thus breaking everything again).

You are basically at 1 million km of your tiny model and you are translating it (you can see the numbers going crazy in the debug menu).

John, stop breaking Nomad :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Yes!! Did it! I was doing everything you said man, I was just getting a bit miffed when the results weren’t visually the same - hence why I began moving the Gizmo. When I tried double tapping on the background nothing was happening at first essentially. I just did all the steps again and tapped on the snap cube instead, and, voila. I can make primitives again, everything is normalised. Merci beaucoup for time & understanding :blush: - the part I also wasn’t understanding or had any concept of was the distance thing.

That made a lot of sense when I read that, helped me with some more grounded understanding.

All I did was scale my model up in world size, turns out I just went waayyy too far? :man_shrugging: Lesson learnt - don’t continuously inflate the size of your model and let the Gizmo round robin it’s size dozens of times looking for a sweet spot (that’s basically what I did - least we know it’s entirely fixable!)

most of this conversation is WAAAY over my head lol.
How big did you end up making it? Was it done with a purpose in mind or strickly on accident?

Oh on purpose, I’ve scaled models up before in older builds, didn’t get this though. Before it used to just scale up and up and up, no round robin. This does also explain why some of my models were clipping out of the camera region in Blender even when those parameters were set to max. :roll_eyes:

1 Like

Maybe a stupid question. I’ll ask it here in case others might not know.

Why scale it up? Does 3D work the same as vector programs (like illustrator)? Can’t we create the model and just scale it up to our hearts desire in the future?

Lots of creative reasons for me personally, I prefer to scale up my models in general to depict world size better if I’m adding in environments - depends on the software, it can impact the visual quality and final look. Which is what I intended to do with this piece. Whilst I think it is vector based, we can’t scale indefinitely until our hearts content. That’s what lead to this particular case - it’s scaling the model up in dimensions in 3D space, which also takes distance into consideration, there has to be a limit at some point.

1 Like