headus 3D tools

[Aliastasia]

Hi,

I have a low poly, splinebased mesh I am working on.
When exporting triangles or quads from Max 2010 using the gw:exporter, and smoothing groups checked or unchecked, the mesh exports fine, and imports fine into UVLayout.
However, when I loaded the mesh into Max, for a texture check, it had lost all it's hard edges. I've tried hitting update post-cleaning and also cleaning the mesh up as much as I can in Max, to no avail.

So - no matter how I export the mesh, once, it's been uvlayout-cleaned, I lose edge hardness. I can always dense up the mesh, but it's a game-prop, so I'd prefer not to.

Help? I couldn't find anything in the manual.

/A

[headus]

When saving the mesh out of UVLayout, use the "Update" button instead of the usual "Save". You then need to select the original OBJ file you loaded into UVLayout, and then a copy is saved out with the exact same material and smoothing properties and only the UVs changed.

Phil

[Aliastasia]

Thank you
I cleaned up my mesh really well, and now there are, thank God, no more alerts on load.
I've tried Update with the other variants of the mesh, to no avail, so I'll put it further to the test - the tidied mesh /Update export>import back into Max went without a hitch

I hope you don't mind my asking - I'm curious: (and I acknowledge I should have RTFM'ed more) Why did you set it up like this? I can definitely see the handiness of using Update, but what made you implement it to begin with?

/A

[headus]

I realize that the "Save" vs "Update" options are confusing and my plan is to eventually incorporate the update function into the normal save.

The reason why there's two different buttons currently is basically because my OBJ import code is pretty dumb and only loads what it needs to (i.e. the geometry and UVs) and it doesn't read all the material and shading information; when it comes to writing the results out, all that information is missing from the internal data structures. The "Update" fixes that by merging all of that extra information back into the saved out results.

Phil

[Aliastasia]

Ah - I figured you'd be updating it at some point, so I didnt ask about that specifically (figuring coming from reading forum posts)

I asked because I was wondering whether you'd adopted good old svn-habits and implemented a .0.0 version to work from - a versioning thing relating to the Tmp-saves.

/A