Seperate unconnected elements into seperate meshes- 3dsmax??

melviso

Is there a way to separate a mesh with a lot of unconnected elements like in Maya in 3dsmax?In Maya, u have the separate and combine buttons which allows u combine selected meshes or separate a mesh into separate parts without clicking on each individual one.
I am aware of the detach and attach tabs, but these require u to click on each individual element everytime. I have a building that contains a lot of assets as one mesh.Clicking on each one is going to be a pain, not to mention some of the assets being difficult to select as they are covered by other faces.
Is there a easy way to do this in 3dsmax?

Eric Chadwick

Yes. Search on Scriptspot.
http://www.scriptspot.com/

monster

I've got a script that does this.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2904948/MaxScript/Modeling_DetachAllElements.ms

FelixL

No need for scripts, convert it into editable mesh and then use the explode function. Set it to 180, and choose objects. It even asks you for a base name, which it will use for the resulting objects along with an ascending number suffix.
Afterwards, just convert back into editable poly.
I never knew this until a colleague told me. Ahh, the mysteries of functions in 3dsMax that are unavailable in either edit poly or edit mesh for no reason....

cptSwing

^ that might cost you your custom normals or vertex colors, if applied. I use turboTools by Matt Lichy, it has an element-to-mesh script included.

Noors

If you want to keep custom normals, the script has to copy the entire object and delete the unwanted faces for each element. It's a particular case tho.

melviso

Thanks a lot for the help,guys. Thanks monster,using the script currently. Tried out explode, had some undesirable results.

MaVCArt

I'm resurrecting this thread, as I just want to add something on: using monster's script, I had a huge increase in performance compared to meshop.getElementsUsingFace. For what reason that is, i don't really know, but here's a little snippet of code that will give you an array of facelists containing elements of the mesh:

for i = 1 to obj.numFaces do

(

    polyop.setFaceSelection obj i

    obj.selectElement()

    appendifunique elements (polyop.GetFaceSelection obj)

)