my main problem with importing my models into poser is that when i create something in max it looks fine and renders fine in max -- but when i import it into poser it ends up with black jagged holes in it in some places. i import it into uvmapper and use the remove degenerate facets command, but it still does it. it seems to be around areas where ive joined 2 objects together with a boolean union. does anyone know what im doing wrong? im working on some dwarven warriors with armor that ill eventually put in the freestuff section, but their plate armor is causing me problems like this. ive already got the chainmail shirts and leather clothing, but their chestplates, helmets and shoulder plates always come up with these jagged holes. ive modeled them 3 times already starting from scratch and i always get the same thing. why do they render fine in max but come up looking like crap in poser? another model i did a week ago did the same thing, where i had joined a sphere to a cube with a boolean union it had several black polygonal holes around it when i rendered it in poser. if anyone wants examples ill be glad to post them. thanks in advance for any assistance. -broken

Broken That is a problem with Poser. It does not read some Geometries right. I have the same proplem with booleans I do in Lightwave. Wish I could help. Ron

Damn. Is there any workaround? I could keep everything in Max (I'm happy rendering in Max), but I wanted to release the finished armor/figures for the Poser community, and theyre not much good with jagged black holes in them. Its basically where I've used boolean unions to join the cylindrical seams/edges to the plates of armor. Sigh, maybe I'll try a different type of modelling.

As an afterthought -- maybe this is something that CL should fix in Poser5. It seems like a pretty big limitation.

have you tried exporting in different formats? I know that when I IMPORT obj files into Lightwave, I have to triple the polys to get some of the 'holes' to 'fill'. Just a thought.

I have a suggestion, it may not work, and you may have already done it, but basically, when you boolean two objects, it still knows them as two seperate objects. Have you tried collapsing the modifier stack down so that all remnants of the old objects are gone? Sort of like flattening all layers in photoshop, it's impossible to go back and edit an individual layer. This may help in the exporting and importing process. I'd be highly interested if this works. Dragontales

Export the max model in obj format or 3ds format. If when you import it in poser seens like it had holes, export from poser in obj format and reimport it in poser again.

Ill try these suggestions, thanks for the quick replies guys.

ok it worked. first i tried to import into poser, then export as an object and re-import but that didnt work at all. what finally did it is collapsing the stack in 3dsmax. dragontales i owe you bigtime. im still a newbie at modelling, but this is a huge breakthrough for me because ive been having so many problems with boolean operations resulting in degenerate facets when imported into poser. now i can finish up my dwarven warriors. thanks everyone for the help, its great to have a community like this where you can post some pretty obscure questions (believe me i searched the web for an answer before i posted it here and found nothing at all) and get an answer within minutes.

Glad to be able to help. I'm new to max myself, and have dabbled with boolean. The only problem with collapsing the modifier stack is that once it's done, you can't go back. It's usually a good idea to save two versions. One that is collapsed, the other not. At least until you know you never need to readjust it. Let me know when the dwarves are done. :) Dragontales

yeah, lets us all know when the dwarven warriors are done. :)

Incidently, I've had models that would crash the Habaware object exporter everytime, but if I exported them from Max as a 3DS and imported them they were fine. The Habaware utilities also have other problems, the mesh triangulation sometimes gets changed a bit. We shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but they aren't up to Max's standard.