OFAC tut 3dsmax ogremax commonproblems

From OpenFrag

Common Problems

• You exported a scene, loaded it in the viewer, and see nothing other than the background color - You can check these things:
  • Make sure you have created at least one camera in your scene - This ensures there is a camera in an expected location. Otherwise a default camera location and direction will be used, which probably isn't what you want.
  • Manually set the far clip distance for the cameras - By default, 3DS Max disables manual clipping for cameras, but the exporter always exports them. You must manually set the camera clip distances to include the parts of the scene you wish to see.
  • If you're using a scene created by someone else, make sure the objects/skeletons/transformations/whatever-else aren't poorly made - You will find lots of 3DS Max scenes floating around on the Internet that were not created with the intent of being exported from 3DS Max and loaded into a graphics engine such as Ogre 3D. Many of these scenes have objects with negative scale transforms, complex bone hierarchies that won't work in Ogre (or any other realtime graphics engine for that matter), or a variety of other problems that no exporter could ever deal with.
• You've applied an optimize modifier to a mesh but the exported mesh is not optimized - The optimize modifier causes a crash with the 3DS Max IGame API. To work around this problem, the exporter disables all optimize modifiers before exporting the scene, and re-enables them when the export finishes.
• Skeleton animations are not exported - There are two possible reasons for this:
  • The bones of your skeleton do not use position/rotation/scale transform controllers - To minimize the amount of animation data exported, by default the exporter looks for keyframed times within the bones' position/rotation/scale transform controllers. If other controller types are used, no key times will be found and so no animations will be exported. In such a case you will need to set a skeleton animation sample interval to sample the transform controller at various times in order to export the skeleton animation data.
  • You have created an uneven number of notes on the skin/physique modifier note track, or you did not specify the animation name for each animation - If you wish to export multiple animations, you'll need to create a note track in the appropriate location, create pairs of notes on the track to indicate where animations start and stop, and give the first of each pair an animation name.

• Your exported skinned mesh is incorrect - In order to export meshes with skeleton animations correctly, your objects must be of a type that evaluate to a predictable number of vertices. For skeleton animations you will generally be using an editable mesh of some sort so this won't be a problem, but if you are using something else, such as an editable patch, you may end up with results like this:

As you can see with the figure on the right, the problem can be solved by applying an Edit Mesh modifier to the object. This modifier should be applied before the Physique or Skin modifier in the object's modifier stack.