Hidden Edges in meshes exported from 3DS Max

Coding
1

Hello,

I’m exporting meshes from 3DS Max using a custom Realflow .bin exporter. I then take these meshes into a C# WPF 3D application I’m working on.

My problem is that WPF will only display triangulated meshes, and the realflow format seems to demand them. This is ok for display purposes but I need to a way to figure out which the hidden edges were in 3DS Max, therefore retaining the quad faces for other parts of my application.

I’ve looked into a number of tri to quad papers on the net, but these seem more suited to turning a complex triangular mesh into a simplified quad mesh.

My question is, does anyone have a method for guessing which faces should be hidden ?. At a push I know I could code an extra element to my .bin exporter to store a list of edges that should be hidden, however I’d love to keep my file format compatible with the realflow format if at all possible.

Many thanks
ben

2

Instead of modifying your .bin format, why don’t you just export another format (i.e. a custom XML or an existing quad format) to disk also that has the quad info you need for your other programs?