Hi bisenberger, when n-gons are imported into a program, the program must also triangulate them for display because the actual video card hardware only takes triangles and does not understand n-gons.

That process of creating a proper triangulation is not particularly easy, and if it is not done carefully it can tend to lead to triangles leaking outside of the n-gon boundary on complex concave n-gons like you are showing there.

So what you are seeing there is a bug in the n-gon triangulation done by the Max OBJ importer.


One way to solve the problem would be to export from MoI using Output: Quads & Triangles rather than Output: N-gons .


In MoI v2, I've also added support for the FBX format, which seems to be handled by Max a lot better than other formats. So if you are using the MoI v2 beta, I would recommend trying to use FBX format rather than OBJ format, you may be able to get proper n-gon results in using that format instead.

But also for FBX make sure that you update to the latest version of the Max FBX import plugin, which is available here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=10775855

- Michael

I'm running max 9 which has already been retired. The most recent version of FBX for max 9 is Version 2009.3 October 2008, but it worked!

Image of FBX import in 3ds max 9.

Hi bisenberger, I'm glad that is working for you now.

That FBX version 2009.3 actually should be fine, that matches the FBX library that MoI currently uses and it is fixed up a lot from the stock one that comes with the default install from older versions of Max.

Additionally, you may be able to get vertex normals to come over properly now which helps a lot to get better quality and smoother looking shading.

- Michael