Import of .ASE is deleting material assignments

wesburke

Hey guys,

I have been fighting a bug for a bit on a project where every time I import a new .ase of said meshes it will wipe out my material assignments and also unchecks Enable Per Poly Collision and Enable Shadow Casting. This is crazy annoying when I see I just need to edit a vert or flip a normal, I will then need to re-assign all of my material slots.

These are rather large SMs with some ranging close to 10Mat slots. (huge city blocks that I am clumping in attempts to reduce draw calls on the mobile.

Has anyone run into this before? Am I doing something wrong in 3D Studio Max on creation?

I am starting to think it may be something weird with the multi-sub or simply the editor buggin out with so many mat IDs. What do you guys think?

whooosh

Rendering 10 different meshes with unique materials on each is no different than 1 mesh with 10 materials.

I would suggest you split up your meshes so that it's one mat per mesh. This way you can instance your geometry (buildings). Also, if you have the meshes as simpler shapes, you can use collision primitives. Enabling Per Poly Collision is a major performance/memory killer.

wesburke

Thank you for the reply... With being on the mobile platform I had thought the draw calls of those instances/meshes would be heavier then just a few draw calls for the entire section of the level being loaded in.

Thanks for the tip on the enable per poly collision. That is insane actually so it creates that dense of a collision cage if that is checked?

Good to know and appreciate the help.

W

Camikaze

I've had weird issues with material slots and ASE files - have you tried exporting/importing as an FBX?

And whooosh is right - each material on a mesh counts as one draw call each.

whooosh

It's a big pain the the butt to get multi mat's working. Things to watch out for:

- make sure you're using a multi sub material
- each material within MUST have a UNIQUE name AND texture.
- During export, make sure the ASE settings are correct (export mat IDs, etc)
- If the above doesn't work, export the object into a new file by itself and export it there. Unlike Maya, I haven't figured out a way to see all the 'bad mojos' in a Max file. No way to delete history and see DAG nodes. So it could really be a bad Max file.

Good luck!

Vailias

It could also be that your material name in max, and therefore the ase, do not match the material names in your unreal package. If I remember right, the static mesh importer will auto match materials to material slots based on the material name in max. So each time you re-import you get blank assignments.

Also yes per poly collision uses the polygons of your mesh, however dense it is, as the collision model.
Check up on creating or importing collision meshes along with statics. Page should come up with a quick search in UDN.

nfrrtycmplx

When you apply a materials to max objects it will automatically create a sub object material unless they are seperate objects...

If you name the material the same in max as the material in unreal it should automatically assign the materials to the material ids... if they are loaded...

at least it used to work that way.

I'll do some test later to verify ... just off the top of me head though that's what I'd consider

GL