Hello, I have been working with 3DS Max 2009 x64 for awhile now, and I am doing some modding work for an old game (Midtown Madness 2). I have completed the part where I have to model my car and texture it up and everything, add wheels, etc.
Now, I have to import this into another 3D modeling program called Zanoza Modeler 1.07b to actually import it into the game. Well, ZModeler can import .3ds files, so I simply export my model as a .3ds from 3DS Max to be imported into ZModeler. What happens? The face count is doubling up and causing for some nasty normals problems in game and crashes while testing the car in multiplayer. I am so frustrated with this I don’t know what to do.
Can anyone relate to my problem and maybe tell me WHY the .3DS exporter is adding faces to my model when I didn’t tell it to and there’s no options about that? This is ridiculous! Thanks to anyone who can help me.
Try removing all of the smoothing groups on your object in Max. It may be adding data to the .3ds object in order to maintain the smoothing in a format that doesn’t support SGs.
When you say “doubling up,” do you mean all faces are duplicated, or that your quads are triangulated? And when you say face do you mean poly or triangle? (I assume you mean triangle, but eliminating assumptions is the first step in solving a problem.)
Whose 3DS exporter are you using? The one that ships with Max, or some other third-party plugin?
Have you tried importing your “bad” 3DS file into a different package, or importing a known “good” 3DS file from another source into Zanoza? Doing this could confirm that the problem is definitely on export from Max, and not on import to Zanoza.
Provided that you’re seeing duplicate faces, I’d suggest first double-checking the original Max file. Make certain that back-face culling is turned off and have another look at the model in Max, looking for redundant geometry in the source art. Max’s STL Check Modifier can prove useful in these sorts of situations as well.
You might also find it helpful to import the exported 3DS file back into Max to see if Max’s interpretation of the file differs from Zanoza Modeler’s.
Yep, I imported the 3DS back into 3DS Max and as I said, the faces (in this case, quads made with editable poly) have twice as many.
When I say “double up” I mean that my face count on the original model goes from:
661 Vertices
454 Faces
to:
661 Vertices
836 Faces
I just can’t understand it. This is getting ridiculous
Also, this is indeed the exporter that shipped with Max.
EDIT: I just used the STL Checker and apparently I have 408 “Open Edges” but this is because I had to “Detach to Element” due to normals issues that would occur if I had left everything welded together…
Isn’t 3ds a text file? You may be better off writing your own exporter/importer at this point, I doubt the 3ds plugin has been updated in at least a decade.
Who knows, all I know is this other 3D program I need to use doesn’t support anything else that Max exports except for 3DS. I’ll probably just find another alternative, but this is just ridiculous…
(ZModeler 1.07b is a really old program, hence the lack of compatibility…)
If you’ve got the same number of vertices, then it isn’t actually duplicating your faces. The 3DS exporter is triangulating all your polys. This is a limitation of the format – nothing is going wrong. It just doesn’t support polygons, only tris.
The normals issue is something else altogether.
Are you 100% sure this is causing the game to crash? It seems like there are a lot of things that could go wrong with a vehicle, the mesh not being the most likely.
Hah, I feel like such a newb now! I’m glad I came here to ask for your guys’ help! I do appreciate all of the feedback I have gotten, but it’s pretty hard to believe that the face count went up because of the triangulating process. To be honest, I never thought of it that way. Doh!
As the user above me said, I guess the normals issues I’m having is a completely different issue, it could very well be the importer that’s putting it in the game. But at least I can rule out the .3DS exporter now!
