Exporting Mult-Sub Obj Textures from references in Max using IVE/OSG

[shivanangel]

Hello,

I have a bit of a problem I just ran into and it revolves around
what will be a large scene inside of Max.

I am modeling an entire 50 city blocks and using object references
inside of 3D max, with the homes and buildings all setup inside
their own files.

One large master file will contain all the XRef objects from the many
scenes.

I have exported these objects to IVE format without a problem,
however when I try to export out the objects when they are referenced
I lose the multiple textures I have put on the different faces of the objects
when I load the model into Vizard. Instead, I only get nothing on the object
that uses multi sub object texturing.

I have also tried this where rather than use a multi sub object material I
place the textures on the individual faces, but this just results in the
object only having one of the many materials on it.

Any help or work around for this? I kinda wanna keep the whole
reference work flow, as I have many models to coordinate and I don't
want to have to mash them all into one scene file.

Thank You,
George Lecakes

P.S. These are just regular old materials, just a .tga applied to the diffuse channel. I found an earlier post with a similar problem with mult-sub objects but they were using 'special' materials not compatible with Vizard.

[Veleno]

Hi shivanangel,

OSG has a bug(feature?) that causes instanced objects to display the same material across all instances of an object, no matter what materials they have had on before. The problem you are getting with XRefs may be tied to the same issue. Currently the only way to handle that issue is to convert anything instanced to unique objects, export, then revert back to the original version. A similar approach should work in your case. I'll let you know if I come across anything better.

-Michael

[Veleno]

Looking into this further, I suspect that the exporter just doesn't know how to properly read the XRef material type, so can't differentiate between one with one material, and a multi sub object material.

I tried a few things with xrefs, and I found that separate objects from the same file export correctly through xrefs. So for your case, in addition to breaking out each material from one object into its own object, you would also need to separate out the materials as well so they no longer share a multi/sub-object material. There is probably a script that can do this on scriptspot.com or maxplugins.de.

Unreleated to your particular problem, but I have also found that when attempting to use xref proxy objects, max will export the proxy instead of the xref object it represents.

[shivanangel]

Thanks Michael, good to know what to expect.
Merging the geometry was the only work around I found for getting everything in Vizard.