Just as another note.

I'm getting twice as many verts as the mesh needs which is fixed by Weld all. I had 12,000 verts reduced to 5,500.

Couple of other problems

1. I have seam in my mesh where the revolved fuselage starts and ends that I can't get rid of. Welding verts doesn't fix it.
2. You can't import other FBX objects until you rename the one in the scene which is called obj1. As the next import will be obj1.
3. Every time you import a new FBX mesh it changes the ambient lighting in the scene to mid grey and you keep having to change it back to black so it doesn't muck up your lighting in the scene.
4. I am getting shading errors in my mesh
5. When I selecting all the polygons of the fuselage mesh and apply smoothing groups to it, it uses every single smoothing group instead of 1 or 2 which is more normal at the default value of 45 deg.

When the normals on the mesh get flipped the right way and 2 sided material turned off I get this crazy pattern.

It also happend to the fin which is modelled in one half but when the symmetry modifier is applied to it (to get the other half) the crazy pattern goes away.

Applying the normal modifier seems to get rid of the crazy pattern.

The normal modifier also got rid of the seam on the fuselage but did not get rid of the shading errors on the fin.

FBX is giving a much nicer mesh than welded obj but I get these little shading errors here and there which I just can't fix inside max without welding vertices together which is a time consuming process going around the mesh trying to figure out which verts to weld in order to get rid of the shade error.

Hi Kevin, thanks for testing the FBX export.


> 1. I have seam in my mesh where the revolved fuselage
> starts and ends that I can't get rid of. Welding verts doesn't fix it.

It looks like I should be able to fix the weld problem so that welded output from MoI will work instead of crashing Max, there was a bug in MoI's exporter in the case for welding. I will put up a test file shortly for you to test with to see if it seems to work ok or not.


> 2. You can't import other FBX objects until you rename the one
> in the scene which is called obj1. As the next import will be obj1.

That's pretty strange - unfortunately that is something that Autodesk will need to fix in their FBX importer. It is not really possible for me to guarantee totally different object names for different files. You can create files during totally different modeling sessions or even on different computers and those different sessions do not have any way to communicate with each other to make unique names between them. It's a problem that needs to be solved by the importer.


> 3. Every time you import a new FBX mesh it changes the ambient
> lighting in the scene to mid grey and you keep having to change it
> back to black so it doesn't muck up your lighting in the scene.

That's another one that will need to be fixed by Autodesk - I'm not setting any kind of lights in the FBX data that MoI writes, so that is something that the importer is deciding to do. There is some kind of big FBX control panel for setting options, possibly there is an option on there to control that behavior.


> 4. I am getting shading errors in my mesh

Probably related to your #1 above - hopefully I can get the welding working and some of the data slightly tweaked so that Max will read the vertex normals in, that could solve this.


> 5. When I selecting all the polygons of the fuselage mesh and
> apply smoothing groups to it, it uses every single smoothing group
> instead of 1 or 2 which is more normal at the default value of 45 deg.

I'm not setting any smoothing group information in the FBX file, so if Max's behavior is not good here, it is probably another one that would need to be tweaked on that side.


But I definitely have a bug for welding on the MoI side that I think I may have nailed down here, I will post a sample shortly and then can you please check to see if it looks good or not?

Thanks,
- Michael