3DS Max, instances and collapsing etc

Mr Whippy

I'm just curious about 3DS Max quad menu 'collapse to editable poly'

When I use it it destroys instances links.

Usually when you collapse a stack for an object with instances you use 'collapse to' in the stack menu right click drop-down.

But if I want to select hundreds of objects many of which are unique and some are instances, and do an operation to them all, then collapse, it removes the instances.

Is there any way around this? Ie, a global operation on many many objects, like FFD warp or global weld or UV X-form, that detects/respects instances when collapsing?



Thanks

Dave

WarrenM

Oh nice!

Noors

What ? How ?
Selecting several instances and collapse them break the instancing for me.
I always add modifiers and collapse on 1 instance.

SsSandu_C

Nice one perna Going to editable poly directly and keeping intances. Cool. But you still have to collapse instances only and not together with the non instanced objects for things to work right.
Turbotools has a smartcollapse script that will do the job. You can use afterwards the turn to poly trick on an instance to go into editable poly without loosing the instance data.

Mr Whippy

I'm having trouble making it work here.

What I've done is got a bunch of objects and they are using a bunch of textures I've built atlases for.

Some objects are instances and others not. About 400 here.

I can easily atlas the textures again into just one or two larger textures and just do UV Xform scales/offsets on different chunks to get the UV's correct again but when I'm collapsing the stacks (combinations of instanced bits and unique bits) the instancing is lost.


In the end it's not a huge problem it just means I have to use an instance finder to isolate those and deal with them separately.


I'll take a look a the turbotools Sandu! Anything to make working with massive project files with many objects like instances etc would be great!


Cheers

Dave