pouët.net

a picture tells a thousand words, so:


that's the problem. on the left, the test mesh as intended. smoothed nicely. after i export this to .3ds and then import, the mesh looks like the one on the right. for some reason instead of 482 vertices the mesh has 762 vertices. so clearly during the export something gets cut up. i seriously have no clue why the fuck 3dsmax is doing this.

any 3ds max users or 3d gurus a clue how i can avoid this? and i NEED to use .3ds as format so don't bother to offer me a bottle of Collada, it's gross. :P

btw it's just a squeeze-modifier deformed 'capsule' from the extended primitives, in case someone wants to reproduce this for testing in 3dsmax.

Have you tried collapsing the modifiers/edit history into a simple mesh (or flattening, or whatever it's called in 3ds Max) before the export? Had some trouble with that in one project.

it looks a common problem : http://lounge.ego-farms.com/showthread.php?t=1513 (materials, modifiers...) merge all and weld if thats a possibility...

when you use texture coordinates per faces, vertices can be reduced from a mesh with vertex tex. coo. even if you do not use mapping.

marq: jup. also editable poly or editable mesh makes no difference. (also it aint smooth groups cos working and borked mesh both only have one group)

skarab: if i do that it indeed fixes the problem. but then i'll export again to .3ds. same problem AGAIN, so the data in the .3ds gets borked. having it look good in 3dsmax isnt my concern. having it look good in a demo is! :)

barti: i dont smoke enough weed to follow anything you said for the last 3 years.

it's deffo something with the .3ds format:
- when i export .3ds and open it in blender. broken mesh.
- when i export .dae and open it in blender. mesh is good.

guess i need that bottle of collada after all :(

Can blender export .3ds?

Quads on the left, broken triangles on the right. The quads are probably cut in to 2 pieces when you export and give you some extra vertices and shit.

Try and convert it to triangles before you export to .3ds and see if that helps?

haha. clever idea.. this happens tho:
i import the 3dsmax-generated .dae in blender. export it as .3ds. reset blender for new project, import the freshly exported .3ds and then i see any geometry. *facepalm* when i import that blender generated .3ds in 3ds max, i do get geometry but no normals... *facepalm again*

i now also narrowed down why we had some mesh issues when doing 1 finger, cos i used 3ds as inbetweeny format too. but christ sake :D oh well, i can use .dae as inbetweeny format now, i hope :)

uh.. i meant to say "then i don't see any geometry" there

first of all: it's .3ds, it's one paddlerooster of a format for which little actually accurate exporters, importers and loaders exist :)

#vanlimburg

Maali: the most popuplar intermediate format is FBX

yeah. so popular e.g. blender doesnt support it. fbx is autodesk's poor attempt at mimicing their take on collada. sooo.. i'll use .dae for now. collada is bloated as fuck, but at least it exports everything as it should.

niels: the problem is. even inside 3ds max itself it cocks shit up and i assume their exporter and importer are the leading standard. so. autodesk -1

btw, now that i examined this problem a bit further. anything with curvy surfaces is error prone. now i know why there's so many cubes in demos.

they were the leading standard back when it was the main format, in the dos days

yeah, i last used it on dos :)

maali: how about modelling in blender and saving as 3ds? Does that work?

blender does support FBX, but it's several versions behind.

Obj? :) The last resort..

.x ;)
directly usable in DirectX and is compressed in video-mem :)

if the estimation of the surface normal points (smoothing groups) is buggy this is what happens.

one idea is to average the normals of your object and see if the normals gets fucked up or if there is something else that is wrong. that way you can pinpoint down to where the bug is. or atleast thats what you could do.

its stuff like this that really makes my dick fall off

JUST USE COLLADA ITS MUCH BETTER!!!1

Use maya. 3dsmax is a deep dying shit.