When scaling very small mesh "wrinkles"

[bentway23]

Hey, guys--I have to squish a Turbosquid model WAAAAAY down (0.00044) to get it to work with my scene, and when I scrunch it that far the vertices get "wrinkly" (see pic), which doesn't make sense to me. It has a fuse early up just to make sure things are, well, fused, but otherwise it's just a scale to fit by match size to get it 2 units high. (I've also tried scaling with transform, which shouldn't--and didn't--make a difference, and also packing it in case treating it as one point helped, which it didn't.) Any idea why this is and how I can get the scaling to behave? Here are pics with it scaled and the same area at full size.

ARGH--addendum: Viewport was apparently screwy. I restarted Houdini and now it's behaving.

Edited November 2, 2023 by bentway23

[ryew]

Hard to say without having the model on hand to inspect and test with, but the widespread separation in the second pic makes it appear the vertices are either not fused/connected or are shearing through each other at different amounts (which is definitely screwy).  Bad topology always seems to be a headache from TS models (lots of triangulated meshes from 3dsMax as well) - anytime I've bought something there, I've spent a good half to full day just cleaning up geo

If you have the bottom center of the model flat at World Origin and are scaling from that pivot of (0,0,0) with a basic Transform, it should really just shrink down to whatever scale without the crazy distortion.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest trying PolyDoctor and perhaps use the visualization options before the fixing options to try narrowing down the problem.

 

[bentway23]

Thanks for the reply--I should have put my above edit as a separate comment so it'd be more obvious.

 

The problem was that the viewport was being obstinate. Resetting it solved things. (This is not the kind of thing I would expect an in-need-of-resetting viewport to do, but, well, there it is.)