How do i...?

General Discussion
1

How do i add an empty property in 3dsmax. In blender, we simply hit space ->then add “empty”. Can anyone give me a video tutorial? I’ve been trying to change the map of roaming ralph using blender, but this approach doesn’t seem to work on it. So i would like to ask a tutorial, step by step on how to do it in 3dsmax? thanks :slight_smile:

2

Even if you could add arbitrary attributes to objects (which I doubt), the max exporter probably doesn’t include them in the egg anyway. I could be wrong though.

3

I guess adding a mesh with one vertex could work. The exporter might automatically optimize them out though.

4

if the export from 3dsmax doesn’t work very wel, you could try to somehow get your model into blender and then use the chicken exporter, which AFAIK is the best supported/maintained exporter at the moment.
blender can import many formats btw, also 3dsmax files

yet another approach would be x2egg.

those are only my thoughts, i have never used 3dsmax

5

That’s debatable. You would be better off with exporting to Maya or collada.

Blender can not import .max files, unfortunately.

6

There are two ways in 3D Studio Max to create custom attributes. The easy version is just RMB on the object, select “properties” in the lower right quad and select the “User Defined” tab. In the text field you enter something like

color=(1,1,1,1)
hitpoints=30

The other option would give you more freedom, but is a hell of a lot more complex. You’ll find that in the Maxscript helpfile under “Custom Attributes Management Functions”.

Unfortunately neighter option is exported by the exporter yet. Which brings me to another question: Does Panda actually have support for arbitrary attributes on nodes? I can’t find any hint of that… and i have built a little maxscript that does export an EGG-file, so that might give me more flexibility…

7

I have no idea about how the Max exporter works, but you can include tags in an .egg file, using the designation. These are automatically imported as tags upon the nodepath associated with the import. You can use the standard getTag() methods to extract them in Python code.

Note that this is typed as a string upon import, so if you want to convert things to, say, a VBase4 structure you will need to perform this manually.