Ok, I've got some new stuff to support the .fbx file format, hopefully this will make a better transfer into 3DS Max.

But I don't have Max over here, so could someone with Max please give this test file a try and see if it works ok?

The test file is attached here as test.fbx.

It is supposed to look like this:



A particular thing to check is if the sphere and cylinder look ok all around in renders, or if they have a kind of "seam" apparent in them along one side. Hopefully Max will be able to read in the smoothing information in the file to get nice quality smoothing and avoid shading glitches.

Please let me know how it works if you are able to give it a try, Thanks!

- Michael

Michael
It tests fine in Carrara!
I could try in XSI or LW but if they wont accept it it's obviously a problem with them and not MoI!

Brian

Perfect Michael, 3dsmax 9 - 64

Hi Brian,

> Michael
> It tests fine in Carrara!

Good news, thanks for testing it there!

I'm not sure if this will be better than OBJ for going into Carrara or not, it seemed like Carrara has a good OBJ importer so it may be no different but it is not bad to have choices!

Max on the other hand does not have a very good OBJ importer and they do not seem to be in much of a hurry to improve it, so that's why it should make a much bigger difference for Max.

- Michael

Hi PaQ, thanks for testing in Max!

Yup, looks absolutely perfect - all n-gons and normals look totally intact and proper there, great!!!

Is there a way to turn on a display of face normals to see which direction they are pointing? Can you take a look at that and see if they are all pointing outwards as expected? That would just be nice to verify as well.

The only thing that is not quite perfect with FBX is that it seems that it doesn't have a structure that allows for a full welding because it doesn't look like 2 adjacent polygons can share the same 3d point but have a separate shading vertex normal for each face. But that would only be apparent if you started dragging vertices around, for rendering directly it does not make a difference. If you need to weld coincident points you can use Max's built in weld/merge vertices function for it anyway.

The kind of annoying thing is that this is actually all the same data as is already written to OBJ, there really isn't a good reason why they should not be reading in the OBJ data just as well as this... But anyway it will be nice to finally have a really good option for bringing data into Max with the high quality true vertex normal shading which makes such a significant difference.

I guess the only other thing left to see is if its n-gon handling is up to snuff for handling really complex n-gons or not. But judging from the initial result it may be good at it.

- Michael

Hi PaQ - one more file to test here if you could, this one has just one big n-gon in it with 814 points, it should look like this:



It should be a pretty good test to see what kind of n-gon ability will be possible there.

- Michael

In Carrara again so you can compare maybe.
Brian

That works fine for the 2 examples above!!!
Wings3D can save as fbx 5, fbx 6, and ascii fbx
What is your?
http://www.wings3d.com/

In the last version of 3DS Max (2009 & Design 2009) the OBJ importer is the previosly plugin by Guruware gw::ObjIO.
So now the Max importer is now so bad at all.
But FBX is a more modern standard and your work is highly appreciate.

Ciao
Luca

Et voila !









Looks ok too ! That's a great news for max users, thanks a lot Michael !!!

Hi PaQ...

Can you share your setting when import fbx file to max ?
Maybe you can give me a screen capture of the import dialog window.

Thanks

Well I'm using the default settings, I didn't change anything. Just using the last version for my max version from autodesk.
Looks like it isn't working for you ?

If that works for Wings3D, seems that must be the same for 3Dmax ;)

Hi PaQ...

Yeah, its not working perfect for me.

So try Wings3D (it's free) and re export as FBX and now load this new FBX in 3DMAx ;)

Hi PaQ...

Looks we have different version of fbx importer.
You have the new one.

@pilou...

I will try it...

Here you can download the newer version of the FBX importer/exporter for free. It's necessary only a registration (but is not really necessary, at the end you will be redirect directly to the download page).

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/mform?siteID=123112&id=10775855

Ciao
Luca

Hi Luca...

thats work great !!!

Ciao !!! :)

Hi Pilou,

> That works fine for the 2 examples above!!!
> Wings3D can save as fbx 5, fbx 6, and ascii fbx

That's good news too, because Wings had some difficulty reading in OBJ files also.

So it looks like this will also be the best way to move data into Wings as well as Max.


> What is your?

I think it's fbx 6, or 6.1 to be exact but that is compatible with 6.

- Michael