I have a need to open .stp files and convert high poly meshes to .fbx format. Your trial works great for converting the meshes; however I cannot apply styles (colors) to the meshes and have them export as .fbx materials. The materials only seem to work with .obj, and unfortunately the obj exporter seriously screws up my high poly meshes, adding extra faces, missing faces. This is just not going to work with the multiple million tri meshes I deal with.

Any chance you can get MOI styles to export as .fbx materials?


It would also be great if when I import the .fbx into MAX, the mesh was an editable mesh, where each corresponding face of the .stp file, was an element (Autodesk Inventor to MAX conversion does this nicely, but the mesh is not as clean as MOI resultant meshes) instead of an editable poly, which is hard to deal with when we're talking 2-3 million tri's.


Make these changes, and I will be a customer ;)

Hi WhiteDwarf - currently styles are only exported to OBJ and LWO formats.

I do want to improve this in the future to make styles apply to other export formats as well like FBX and SKP formats too. This will probably happen sometime in the v3 timeframe.


> and unfortunately the obj exporter seriously screws up my
> high poly meshes, adding extra faces, missing faces.

Actually MoI's OBJ exporter creates exactly the same polygon structure as the FBX exporter - they both use the same mesh generation mechanism.

The problem that you're seeing with OBJ is in Max's importer - it's probably messing up handling complex n-gons. It seems that Autodesk has not really put much effort in developing their OBJ importer and only really works on their FBX importer - that's actually why I implemented an FBX export from MoI in the first place, because it seems to be the only good way to get n-gon mesh data into 3DS Max.


> It would also be great if when I import the .fbx into MAX, the
> mesh was an editable mesh, where each corresponding face of
> the .stp file, was an element

You could try exporting from MoI with welding turned off - that will make the mesh for each NURBS face have their own separate vertices where they meet at common edges. It should then be possible to use some polygon processing tools to separate the mesh into one piece for each chunk that has connected faces.

I'm not really sure how the FBX file would need to be structured for what you are describing - the FBX toolkit itself uses a somewhat different terminology for its various mechanisms and I'm not sure what thing in FBX gets mapped to an "element" in 3DS Max.

It's kind of hard for me to work on FBX because it's not that well documented and I can't test it very easily so that makes it something that I don't like to mess around with that much. It will probably be possible to do the styles export part, but it doesn't seem likely that I'd be able to get to the part about changing how the mesh is structured.

- Michael