I have a skinned mesh that is textured with three textures (lower body, upper body, and head/face). When I export and render it by default, I just get a single texture over the entire mesh. How do I make the single mesh contain multiple subsets with different textures?
And, if panda doesn’t support multi-material meshes (that would be a shame!) then how do I make sure that a composed node set animates and blends correctly, given that the separate material meshes would all be weighted to the same skeleton?
(And, separately, I can’t get the animation and character to export with the same bone hierarchy, but there’s a separate post for that)
I don’t know beans about the Max exporter, so I’m afraid I can’t answer any questions pertaining to that. But I can assure you that Panda can support an animated mesh with different textures on different parts of it.
Does the exporter combine your three different textures into one big texture? That would be really weird. Or does it just fail to detect the multi-texture mesh, and apply one of the textures to all pieces, resulting in a model with some incorrect textures applied?
Are you using the exporter provided with 1.5.3, or an earlier version? I only ask because the Max exporter has reportedly undergone a major rewrite with 1.5.3. I don’t know if this new rewrite has had a lot of exercise, though, so there might be bugs lurking within it. Or, possibly, it was never built to support multi-material meshes, in which case you’d have to model your meshes separately in Max. This shouldn’t cause Panda any trouble, though; provided your joint weights were consistent between the meshes, it should still stitch the model together seamlessly at runtime.
I think this is what happens. I am using the new Max exporter (1.5.3).
I actually side-stepped the problem for my sample mesh, by manually texture-sheeting all the textures and re-mapping the mesh. For now, that’s good enough, but I’d be interested in a better solution. I suppose I could select triangles by material ID and extract into new meshes, but I’m afraid the Skin blend weights might get lost when doing that, so I’d like to understand the implications of the current Max pipeline path first.
Btw: I think the new exporter seems pretty good. It hasn’t crashed once on me so far, which is a good sign. It also has capabilities similar to my own .X exporter (kW X-port), including saving export set-ups in the scene file, so porting content between set-ups will probably not be too terrible (as long as I can get multi/sub materials exporting properly, that is…)
Well it’s not working. I get one texture spread all over the exported model using all the different mapping coordinate sets - the same problem as jwatte described if I’m not mistaken.
With the question I meant more whether anyone is looking into this issue or not.
The problem is the exporter. It sadly only exports one texture entry. And as each face entry links to this entry, there is no real chance to put that in by hand. You seem to use already the workaround to this: Create several objects, one for each texture, then export them all into one file…
You could also try to go via the X-exporter, i haven’t tried that yet.
It does, the exporter just doesn’t. It seems some older version of the exporter does though, as i have some objects here with multitexturing exported from max ages ago. Guess my surprise, when it didn’t work with the new version
Hmmm… if the verts on the shell-borders of the meshes are weighted the same, there shouldn’t be any problems… does the mesh open when you pose the character?
Huh, that sounds like a bug. Give me a very simple .max file with multiple textures that exported well before but not anymore and I can investigate it.
I believe that the reason is that the Max exporter was somewhat recently entirely re-done as a new “Egg” object inside the Max scene. I doubt it shares much code with the older version.
That being said, I find it disappointing that there is no maintainer for the 3ds max tool from either Disney, CMU, or the community – the solidity of the art tools is what separates also-rans from true champions for game development.
Actually, before, it has been an “egg object” too, I think. It does share quite some code.
I agree on the maintainer thing - the person who rewrote the exporter left afterwards. Would anyone be willing to be the new maintainer? It’s not that hard to get into the code, and I’m sure everyone would be willing to assist.
