'Physically' large mesh inside of Max having smoothing problems

adam

Hello!

I am trying to work on a scene entirely inside of Max while I prototype an idea. Part of that requires that I work in very large scales inside of Max.

While I am sure I could just try to chop this mesh up in to smaller pieces to hopefully fix the error, I am only assuming I am having this problem because of the scale of the mesh.

I created a mesh that was 500 square meters, and divided 500 times, resulting ins a 500m-squared mesh built out of 1m-squared quads. I brought that mesh in to Mudbox (not trivial, yeesh) and sculpted on that (never sub-dividing the mesh). I exported that mesh back in to max and it looks great. However, its being viewed as an Editable Mesh, not an Editable Poly. When I convert the mesh to an Editable Poly, the faces no longer respect the smoothing groups, and it seems to be showing the mesh with vertex colours (black & white blending).



I've tried:

1. Resetting the normals.
2. Resetting Xform, the pivot, and the scale.
3. Applying a new material.
4. Painting all of the verts to a medium grey.

I know Max can do really stupid things some times with very large geometry, I figure this is one of them. I'm hoping someone has seen this before and knows of a solution that is not chopping this mesh up in to smaller scale pices (I'm not even sure if that would work). It would really interrupt my workflow to have to work with the terrain separated like that.

Obscura

Simply add "smooth" modifier to your mesh?

.Wiki

Your smoothing treshold is to high. Set it to 30 degree or so. If your mesh would consist of quads you could also subdivide it once without smoothing and then apply a render subdivision iteration or two.

Neox

did you try exporting as obj and importing it again? try different solutions with normals, without, with smoothinggroups, without etc.

Pathologist

It seems to me that your editable mesh has no smoothing going on at all, I would say the same .Wiki is saying; try different smoothing thresholds on your smoothing groups.

poopipe

the normals are borked - hence the weird irridescent looking shading.

usually this works

turn to poly
edit normals - break them all
turn to poly
collapse

sort out normals in the conventional fashion

Mark Dygert

Aside from going to war with the normals, is "2 lights" turned on in the viewport setting?

jfeez

ive had this problem a few times as well =( i converted it to an edit patch and it fixed the problem but it is an issue with the normals being a bitch(but then everything is triangulated). Try what poopipe said it should work (didnt when i had the problem but that was my general noobness)

poopipe

going to patch will shatter your UVs - best avoided IMO

low odor

what poopipe said should work... but assuming it the scale instead...one thing you could do is import it into max at a smaller scale ratio than you exported it...then you the rescale world units Utility to scale it up the correct ratio..

edit: I would make sure you use the "Selected" option when using the rescale world Unit utility....or it will fuck up the units for everything

adam

Neox wrote: »

did you try exporting as obj and importing it again? try different solutions with normals, without, with smoothinggroups, without etc.

This worked! Thank you :thumbup:

Neox

max...

glad it worked!

Drew++

adam wrote: »

This worked! Thank you :thumbup:

I think I also have a fix for this problem... If it's the same as what I run into sometimes, I just selected the whole element, and detached it as a new object, and that fixes it!