maintaining materials when exporting as .3ds

[Dave Buckley]

hi guys, i am looking for a way of saving items drawn in Max as .3ds files with their material properties and mapping retained. the materials are not standard but are made from photographs taken

[alrawli]

.3ds file will keep materials and mapping but there are a couple of things you need to do to get it to work. Materials and texture names need to be less than 8 characters in length to start with and the textures should be in the same folder as the 3ds file and you should be good to go.

[Dave Buckley]

thanks for the reply

 

however

 

i made a folder on my desktop, in it i placed the photgraphs that i want to use for the texture files (both less than 8 chars)

 

i then created my scene (a plane and a teapot) applied the materials to each one from the folder on the desktop as described above

 

i then applied uvw mapping to each object

 

i then exported as .3ds to the same folder that i took the materials from

 

i close max and then reopen it.

 

i goto file > import and browse to the .3ds file that is in the folder with the photographs

 

and voila it opens but there are no materials?????

[alrawli]

Hmmm just tried the same thing. If you use the eye dropper in the material editor then it shows that the object holds the material but looks back to the default max folder for the image rather than the folder that holds the texture.

 

We use polytrans for exporting and havent had an issue when opening the 3ds files with textures in it.

[Dave Buckley]

is polytrans free???

[alrawli]

Afraid not think its a couple of hundred quid.

 

What program is going to be opening the .3ds files? If you bundle the 3ds file with the textures from the scene in the same folder when the third party opens it its just a case of asset tracking the textures if it doesnt automatically look for the origin folder.

 

We export as 3ds from max then open in Polytrans ( it uses the folder that the geometry file is in as the folder where the textures will be ), so the 3ds comes in with materials and we then export to.x files from there.