3DS Max - Model not exporting with turbosmooth

RashedAlmetrami

Hey guys, 

I'm trying to bake out my high-poly model in substance but it seams like it's not exporting with the turbosmooth modifier, resulting in horrible normals. If I collapse the modifier it works but I'd rather not have to do this for all the individual models.


Any help is much appreciated!

vertex_

AFAIK the stack has to be collapsed on export.

How many individual models do you have? You could make a duplicate set of high poly models and combine a lot of the meshes, then apply the modifier.

Macebo

Strange... i never had to collapse my stack to export the high poly.

Are you exporting it as .obj or .fbx? I'm sure that the FBX exporter tessellates the model when there is a turbosmooth modifier on top.

LaurentiuN

If you are exporting as FBX uncheck the Turbosmooth option, to me that way works.

Revel

What @s1dK said, yeah it kinda counter-intuitive to uncheck the Turbosmooth option, since you will expect 3ds Max to "do not" export the TS modifier, but after abit of research, it turns out that the option is to export the TS modifier WITH the fbx, which if your target app (in this case Substance Painter) didn't support importing modifier, then it will just import whatever data that it can read without the TS applied.

NoRank

Well you can just select them all and click with the right mouse button and convert to editable poly, this will colapse everything. Export it and ctrl + z so you don't lose your layer stacks.

RashedAlmetrami

@s1dK  @Revel Thanks for the help guys! I ended up collapsing everything to an editable mesh but will keep what you said in mind for next time. 

Thanks again to everyone.

Mark Dygert

Revel said:

What @s1dK said, yeah it kinda counter-intuitive to uncheck the Turbosmooth option, since you will expect 3ds Max to "do not" export the TS modifier, but after abit of research, it turns out that the option is to export the TS modifier WITH the fbx, which if your target app (in this case Substance Painter) didn't support importing modifier, then it will just import whatever data that it can read without the TS applied.

Yep, they could probably word that better or explain it in a tooltip.

That feature preserves the lower poly version and the turbosmooth settings, just like the skin modifer, which Maya actually reads and correctly binds the skin using it's specific tools. If you export out of Maya with skin, 3dsmax correctly reads it and applies the right modifier. It works because the importers know how to handle those settings.

If you import your "preserve TS" into 3dsmax you'll get the low poly version with the Turbosmooth applied as a modifier. In other apps and before it was an option, the exporter would always collapse it and any low poly version would be lost. Unfortunately other importers only see the low poly version and don't know how to handle the turbosmooth settings.

PolyStarbolt

Makes your high poly file size gigantic though, unless I'm doing something wrong.

poopipe

collapsing everything is silly. 

I put a turn to poly modifier on top of the stack that preserves convex faces  and triangulates then run a script that snapshots, exports the snapshot meshes and then deletes them  - this eliminates any weird shit that can work it's way up the stack and also allows for export of meshes affected by world space modifiers/animation controllers/spacewarps etc.


@PolyStarbolt - a high poly mesh will be big if it has lots of geometry in  - nothing you can do about that