3DS Max & 'surfaces' in B3D:How to reduce?
Community Forums/Developer Stations/3DS Max & 'surfaces' in B3D:How to reduce?
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| Hi, I have started working with a friend who is an artist who uses 3DS MAX, although mainly for high polygon scene rendering not real time game objects. We would like to create a group of objects - like trees for instance, which when exported using B3D Pipeline and each tree uses the same texture file for leaves and trunk, in such a way that these trees share the same surfaces. To put it really simply with an example: In 3DS MAX if he creates two cubes with the same texture and exports it as B3D do the two cubes share the same surface and if not (I don't know one way or the other yet) is there a way to get them to do so? Thanks, Matt |
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| if you arent lightmapping, you can modify the instance extension so that every instance becomes a part of a single surface. Or just use the attach command on all the polys that use the same texture. Thats the most simple ways and not 100% but it works. I suspect that the video card further subdivides surfaces where you have smoothing group seams too. Not sure. |
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| Thanks Evak. What we had in mind is to create the level in 3DS MAX, then lightmap it in Giles and then reimport it back into MAX to split it up into sections to allow for more efficient rendering in blitz. Does that sound possible? |
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| Matty, I know its not as easy, but you should consider breaking it up in Giles - Giles is capable of grouping and you can save - delete load etc. Putting it all back into Max I think will cause a headache for you. Try a simple test to check it out, Giles won't be able to handle as big an area as you might like though, compare to Max. The other thing is to break it up in Max FIRST - then export it and pass it through Giles to lightmap and simply adjust the models and textures you want to light as you go, switching some on and some off - maybe? IPete2. |
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| I actually find Max a lot more flexible to use then Giles, but that may just be through experience and the fact that I like full control of my UV maps since I use them for masking between textures too. But Giles is a very good tool, and if your not terribly familiar with max renderer, or photometric lights, giles will get you a good result quickly. The one nice thing about giles is that you don't have to combine all the meshes that you want to have share the same lightmap before rendering the lightmap, and the Auto UV tool is typicaly better than Max's but not as efficient as doing it by hand. (which unfortunately takes a rather long time). One of the benefits of max is that you can render thumbnails of your scene in a few seconds even with fairly complex scenes and see what results you have without waiting till the render is done like you do in giles. If your going to use max, its best to leave it till near the end, and use the bakersfield lightmapping scripts, which make the lightmapping process far less tedious than the default tools. Another advantage of lightmapping in max is that you have more cobtrol of lighting, like reflected light from shiny surfaces, and you can play around with bumpmaps and things in your 3dsmax materials to produce more varied and interesting natural surfaces. |
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| Thanks again. |
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