Hi Ryan, what exactly are the objects? Are they terrains or what?

Are they flat? Did you try changing the projection? Generally, changing from world standard to object standard, or to the shape of your object gives good results. If you're using texture maps, Vue selects " automatic", you may have to change if to something else to get the right result.

It's a flat plane...it's basically where the sand will lie. It's flat. Imported from a 3ds, it's basically nothing but a line of triangles. I'll try changing the mapping.

Thanks for the replies guys. This has happened the day after I got my business to buy it for Viz :( EDIT: I tried the remapping to no avail. The surface can take an ecosystem though.

Message edited on: 09/08/2005 14:14

Maybe it is the normals. I would remake the object a few ways to find the reason out quick and then load the object in a new vue scene and texture it and save it as a vob. Then, load the vob into the scene. Good luck.

Have you tried several materials? Especially procedural materials or simply basic ones. Pure red for example. To see wether it has to do with the object or anything else. And how do you apply the materials? Drag and drop or by right mouse click on the object name in the world browser to apply the material through that? Try that and report the results please. Finally, if you want to, send me the object to let me see what is going on. Not that i probably can help too much, but sometimes four eyes see more than two.

Yeah, I tried several materials. I believe it's just a poor import. Everything I make into a DTM (aka triangle network) in my model and then import it, it will not accept a material. All it is is a bunch of triangles connected. Should be THE easiest thing to import. I apply materials by clicking on the element and then double clicking the material preview and going from there. I have a few more importing options to try. There's one option I feel it may be. I'll report back.

This can be so obvious that people overlook it, but it couldn't be that your object has slipped BELOW the ground plane, could it?

Never heard of DTM, is it a 3d file format? What I've tried for a scene is make a simple triangular polygon in C4D, a lot easier than working with booleans in Vue, exported it as a 3ds object, and it loaded fine in Vue, and material was correctly applied.

I had some problems with 3ds the day before yesterday too - they simply didn't show up correctly. What i did and normally always do when things like that happen is to load them into Amorphium 1.0 (was free on several magazine CDs a while ago and is from EIAS) and save from there as obj. It corrects the normals and seems to write a clean file that was read by Infinite perfectly.

Amorphium? I just got Deep Exploration 2 for converting...but if that doesn't work, I'll check that out. I wonder if 3D World had it as I've had a subscription for a few years. JC - Nope, it's above the ground plane. It's basically the sand leading out of the water. For now, I've basically made it non accurate but I will need to eventually be able to texture these. Bruno - DTM isn't a file format. It's just a term used for a Digital Terrain Model...aka a network of triangles that make up a terrain. I'm importing from a 3ds file though. I'm going to keep on trying. I appreciate the suggestions.

Well, for conversion Deep Exploaration is of course MUCH better. Amorphium is a very little program in which loaded objects are like "virtual clay". A low level version of ZBrush so to say. But sometimes very helpfull - i did cobblestones for example very easily from a simple block. Just some strokes with one of the many deforming brushs. If you don't know it, have a look. Maybe for some specific things it might be a help.

Does creating an UV map for the object in Max help?

HABware has a free .OBJ importer/exporter for 3ds max 4 thru 6. I've given up on 3DS imports a long time ago, exporting as .OBJ from Max tends to work much better.

UV map did not help. You know what did? DEEP EXPLORATION. BEST $150 I SPENT IN A LONG TIME! I convinced my bosses to buy Vue and then it wouldn't texture the format we needed it to. I just open the DWG export in there, save it as a lightwave object, and there ya go. Accepts textures n all that!

So a job saved - great!