Try exporting it as an OBJ file. 3DS export is sometimes problematic when they use N-gons instead of quads or tri's.

Yes, i agree with dburdick. It's a problem with the mesh you are importing. Take a close look at the mesh in Wings. Look for any polygons with more than 4 sides and split those so they have no more than 4 sides.

In case you're not familiar with 3D jargon, "n-gons" means "any number of sides" and infers too many sides. A "quad" is a polygon with 4 sides and a "tri" is a tringular polygon.

Look also for gaps or other problems. And when you want high resolution, you have to have enough polys to support that, or your model with look "faceted".

You can adjust the "Smoothing Angle" in Vue to smooth out some of that "faceting". Right-click on the object parts, choose "Edit Object" and look at the smoothing angle. Larger angles give a smoother look, but smooth out details.

_ jc...'Art Head Start' e-book
.......'Art Head Start.com site Digital Art skills. Free lighting chapter, tutes, Vue models, tex pix.

I haven't had problems importing 3ds meshes with n-gons in Vue. Did you try inverting the normals on the hi-res version?

Some 3DS importers/exporters have trouble with meshes larger than 64K polygons. You could try Wavefront .OBJ export/import instead.

Thanks for your tips. The high resolution mesh has 71K polygons. I have tried exporting as .obj, but wings always crashes when I do so. Ill try triangulating the mesh, but that will result in an even higher amount of polygons, wont it? probably have trouble again there... Ill try inverting the normals as well. Thanks for your tips. Ill let you know if it worked.

Unfortunately none of your tips seem to work. exporting as .obj makes wings crash. so does triangulating the mesh, but all polies are quads anyway, so that should not be the cause. inverting normals also has no effect. I think my computer is the problem. Its rather old... Whats the difference between .obj and .3ds anyway? how come my wings crashes with .obj and not with .3ds?

send me your 3ds, i try to convert with Deep Exploration in Obj, the in vob for vue... what your vue version ?

Sorry everyone, seems i misinformed you about Vue not importing n-gons. Did have problems with mesh imports several builds ago, which i blamed on that and reported to e-on. Those old problems might have been about UV mapping instead, or, more likely, have been fixed in newer Vue builds. I can now import meshes from Silo 3D with more than 4 sided polys. Thanks for the correction Bruno021!

I'm surprised at Wings crashing when you try to export an OBJ of 71k polys. I've just tried importing Vicky 3 duplicating her and exporting both as an OBJ of 150k polys with no problems. If you want to get rid of ngons don't triangulate, select all faces then tessalate/quadrangulate.You could also use Cleanup on the object to get rid of extremely short edges and unconnected vertexes.

I got such renders, in the beginnings :
using really extremely small (0.ooooo...o1) polygon sides,
or meshes obtained by rotation, with small rotation angles, which resulted in a dense grid of nearly parallel faces.
Seems that this was too much for the floating point calculating abilities - of the 'puter, or the export module, or the renderer's, I don't know.

Making models more "clean",
without extremely small polygons (not really necessary),
and diminishing the number of points used in polylines for generating rotation (lathe) objects, using less angular steps,
got things right. Well, this problem here has perhaps alltogether different origins, I don't know...

Good points GPFrance.

As i'm learning 3D modeling, it seems that there is a lot of skill and craft in making meshes with no more polys then necessary (anticipating any smoothing in the destination software), and the right SubDivision level and with the best loop structure and increasing polys only where extra detail is needed.

Using Silo 3D and working intensely at the individual face/vertex/edge level is very enlighting. Great meshes don't seem to happen by pushing a few buttons in a higher level program, they take real hands-on poly sculpting and an expert eye.

I'm not saying you can't do that in Wings, just that meshes are not easy to build well.

The mistake i make most often is creating primitives with what seem the right number of polys, then later taking them to a lower SubD and getting way too many polys where 3D detail is not neeed and having to remove a lot of them.

_ jc...'Art Head Start' e-book
.......'Art Head Start.com site Digital Art skills. Free lighting chapter, tutes, Vue models, tex pix

One thing to remember about 3ds is that it's a very old format, so old it still has the old DOS 8 character file name limit, and 3ds files have to be completely made up of tri's, the format doesn't support quads or n-gons, also, and don't quote me on this, but I also seem to remember there being a polygon limit with 3ds files. There are ways around the file name limit, but none that I've found for the fact that the mesh has to be completely triangulated before exporting, LW for exanple won't export to 3ds unless it is all tri's in the first place, and I think some problems I originally had with using Deep Exploration to do the conversion were due to the fact that the model was being triangulated by DE as part of the conversion process, and was occasionally screwing the mesh up along the way. I know this doesn't help you with your problem, but it might help towards explaining some of the reasons your having trouble with the 3ds export/import Cheers Billy

Hi, Billy !
If I remember rightly, there is a 64-k-limit or so, to 3ds (->TooBig1, TooBig2... in C4D). If the object divides to sub-objects, the limit seems to apply to those, not the entire group. Perhaps that's why dadt's Vicky passed the test.
Export scripts screwing up files, when they triangulate polys, especially when polys have an extremely short side or coincidences near zero (rounding errors ?), is a daily worry. Resizing the objet by *5 or 10, before export might fix it. Algorithms aren't very intelligent.

Sometimes, when things are running too well, I simply foul up gones manually, which gives such peaks - I'm rather efficient at that sport ! ;-)
Things like inverse numbering of points (screwed polys), open faces, unclosed polys, doubled points, offset a micron, overcrossed bevels...
With some ancient renderers, it was possible to show such spikes, even using a good mesh : For example by grouping it inside an other object, and have the cam's projection plane center cut a vertex. T'was especially efficient in animations...
My artistic creativity has no limits, to do the job :-) - I don't know if such applies here.

Did RemcoVANMERM send the file to Rodluck for a try ?
Did they get any farther with this spikes question ?

Thanks Billy and GPFrance, your explanations are very useful. I havent sent the file to Rodluck yet, because i want to try to fix things myself first. With your explanations i have some more possible solutions again, but, as I noticed while trying the other suggestions, my computer is simply too old for this work. So what I will do first is buy a new computer, which is something I need anyway. If by then I still have the same problem, i will send the file to Rodluck to see if he can solve it.

Remco, I don't think it's your computer that's at fault, I'm still using a old PC running a Pentium III 733 and Windows 98 at home, and a year old PC at work, the errors I get at home I also get on the new system in work, the chances are it'll be the file itself.

I know rodluc wants you to send it over to him, could you also send it over to me? I'll import it into Lightwave and fix it up as though I was doing a conversion for Poser/Vue and test it in Vue4 and P5 and then send it back over for you to try, I might be able to spot whats causing the problem in the first place and then you will be able to avoid it in the future.

GPFrance: thanks for the info, I knew I'd seen there was a poly limit, and now I think about it, I've had a problem exporting 3ds from LW when the mesh is too big, and that poly limit was what it was.

Cheers

Billy

Message edited on: 03/15/2006 12:19

Another possibility: break up the mesh in several parts and export those separately. It might be a good idea to split them by material. Import the separate meshes into Vue, group them and save as .VOB. The advantage of not welding the parts is easier material changes. The disadvantage is sharp edges where two parts meet. So it might be better to weld the parts together in Vue.

Message edited on: 03/15/2006 14:44