Craziest Max Problem

Murdoc

Hey,

I'm back to asking weird Max questions and I have a really crazy one.

I have a file that contains models/materials/textures; the problem is the material it is using was a proprietary game shader that I no longer have; it was a dll apparently. Now when I try to open the file I get a missing dll stuff and nothing happens; it wont even open the model I need.

So... anyway to strip out the model from a .max file or any other way to get to it?

Understandable if it's impossible, but would be awesome if there was a solution.

MoP

Tried doing a File -> Merge?

achillesian

if that doesnt work you could make a fake dll, and the shader would probably just end up blank, or you'll get another error.

Murdoc

yeah, tried a merge, import, etc... didn't work.

I'll give the dll fake idea a try when I get home; thanks for the idea!

shadows

Start max in software mode, that should work, at least it did work on previous versions of max.
Customize-Preferences-Viewports-Choose Driver-Revert from ... - Software and reboot max

Murdoc

Nope, neither solution worked, thanks for the suggestions, guess its lost forever. turns out the custom shader thing was a dlm and dlu; still tried faking it but it doesn't work.

SyncViewS

I'm sorry for not being able to help, but maybe I can provide an explanation. In my opinion the issue is not with the material, but with the dlm. That extension denotes a Modifier Plugin. The reason why you cannot retrieve your geometry in any way, is because there is an "unknown" modifier in the stack and the geometry pipeline cannot be evaluated to the resulting mesh. Not being able to do so, is like not having a mesh in the scene at all. I don't think there is a way to fake such dlm, as every plugin have a unique classID that need to match the one saved within the scene in order to work, and you neither have access to a fake dlm code, nor know what that ID is.

The only reasonable solution is to get in touch with the dlm owners and ask them to "extract" the mesh for you, if that is possible.

Murdoc

Ah cool, Sync. I figured it was just simple enough to try to extract the mesh from it.

Yeah, no getting around it, I just took some of my stuff from an old job without thinking about what it was attached to, so not much chance of getting it.

Ah well, no biggy. Thanks for the help everyone.