probs with .W3d export
polycounter lvl 18
Howdy guys,
bronco needs some help again,as normal.
We are using a pipeline between Max 8 and Director MX 2004 to create a browser based 3d game.
I have my 3d model set-up in max, its at about 10,000 polygons Because of the cartoony style alot of it is just diffuse colours but there are so far about 10 bitmap textures in .jpg in the scene,they are all no more than 256 size.
The last 3 days or so we have had no problems exporting the scene in .W3d format from Max to director,until today that is.
Nothing was significantly changed from when it worked fine.
Now it seems we cannot export from max to director without it causing a fatal error and crashing director on Import.
We have been trying for the best part of the day to find out a) the cause of the crash b) how to avoide it.
Currently we can import the scene in layers to get round the problem but thats less than ideal on bigger scenes . Oddly enough all the previews for me on export show up fine for me and the debug reports doesn't show up with any problems. the problem when the programmer imports the scene he gets either a fatal crash or a file that claims to be empty.
causes of action taken:-
*imported model into director with no textures at all - worked fine.
*reset the xforms on evrything - well,ya know how that buggar tends to fubar stuff.
* we read somewhere that .W3d may have probs with -1 UV Co-Ordinates- all objects with -1 UV co-ordinates have been imported,with textures sucsessfully before this episode.
*exported the model from max with 1 texture at a time - fine
*exported model with 2 or 3 textures at a time - fine,until totally random fatal crash.
* tripled checked the textures themselves - all fine.
*Imported the model objects with one by one to identify problems - fine.
*Attached all objects into one big object with textures and exported - worked fine.
* Our programmer tried forcing the file to open - the result was pretty enevitable but that also created the fatal error.
Now im out of ideas
Under current circumstances we can live with importing the scene in layers or chunks as it is a sample. but this is by no means ideal and if im honest,im just bloody curious to find out what is acturally causing this seemingly random error.
sorry about long post,just wanted to give you guys as much detail as I could.
thanks in advance for any help.
John
bronco needs some help again,as normal.
We are using a pipeline between Max 8 and Director MX 2004 to create a browser based 3d game.
I have my 3d model set-up in max, its at about 10,000 polygons Because of the cartoony style alot of it is just diffuse colours but there are so far about 10 bitmap textures in .jpg in the scene,they are all no more than 256 size.
The last 3 days or so we have had no problems exporting the scene in .W3d format from Max to director,until today that is.
Nothing was significantly changed from when it worked fine.
Now it seems we cannot export from max to director without it causing a fatal error and crashing director on Import.
We have been trying for the best part of the day to find out a) the cause of the crash b) how to avoide it.
Currently we can import the scene in layers to get round the problem but thats less than ideal on bigger scenes . Oddly enough all the previews for me on export show up fine for me and the debug reports doesn't show up with any problems. the problem when the programmer imports the scene he gets either a fatal crash or a file that claims to be empty.
causes of action taken:-
*imported model into director with no textures at all - worked fine.
*reset the xforms on evrything - well,ya know how that buggar tends to fubar stuff.
* we read somewhere that .W3d may have probs with -1 UV Co-Ordinates- all objects with -1 UV co-ordinates have been imported,with textures sucsessfully before this episode.
*exported the model from max with 1 texture at a time - fine
*exported model with 2 or 3 textures at a time - fine,until totally random fatal crash.
* tripled checked the textures themselves - all fine.
*Imported the model objects with one by one to identify problems - fine.
*Attached all objects into one big object with textures and exported - worked fine.
* Our programmer tried forcing the file to open - the result was pretty enevitable but that also created the fatal error.
Now im out of ideas
Under current circumstances we can live with importing the scene in layers or chunks as it is a sample. but this is by no means ideal and if im honest,im just bloody curious to find out what is acturally causing this seemingly random error.
sorry about long post,just wanted to give you guys as much detail as I could.
thanks in advance for any help.
John
Replies
You should check that you can make a projector for the game, because if you are at it's size limit that might fail as well. If i remember correctly my class mates and I used to run into problems with director when we reached a certain file size. To work around it we had to use several director files to create the final projector. Director would simply refuse to open the file and crash once the director file got to a certain size, so that might be your problem or something similar. Of course we only did basic 2d game stuff, but those files got big pretty fast.
Alex
Ged- its a strange one,the previews and evrything on exsport worked fine,the debug reports were fine on the exports and evrything else was fine,bit strange. Annoying we have to use Director really,would have rather done it using the Blitz engine,but unfortunatily the potential client wants the product to run on both Mac and Pcs and in a browser.
Alex - We established it wasn't file size becuase we managed to import/export a large range of file sizes,upto 2.5 meg (we havent gone beyond that yet,but we were looking at an online FPS done in director and the map files where .W3d files of around 15meg),
After 1.5 days and the fact we are currently only working on a sample our programmer has got a versatile layering system into director so I can just import/exsport as nessary. I got the working layers in fine,any exsports that had a problem I reapplied the textures and mapping and they then exsported on new layers and they seem to work fine as indervidural assets.
The system he's created also gives us more versatility as I can now put stuff on one layer - name it using our agreed naming convention and have him create shaders on the relevent layer via code.
Still no idea what was causing the crash though,would be curious to find that out
Thanks again,
J