Hi, please does somebody know how decrease size of bounding box of imported prop to fit the mesh tighter? I ve created prop (dogs tongue), in MAX and imported into Poser, but I was surprised that the bounding box is much larger than mesh (in vertical, esp. yz axis orientation). I supposed that I have to manipulate pivot (to center with the mesh) before export from MAX, but it desnt work :-( It is usually OK, but I ve created just the dogs tongue by detaching polygons from Zygotes dog bottom inner mouth surface (ie clone=copy, and join both sourfaces together, then push vertices to achieve the wanted result..) I am also suprised that I cant export OBJ using Habware MAXOBJ PlugIn from MAX 3.1 properly, I am allways getting some missmassh.. to get I have to export like 3DS, open the 3DS file in Poser ann then eventually export, and then the final OBJ is correct yet (eg. loadable into UV Mapper to remap etc.) I ve tested various option combinations in the MAXOBJ dialog but unsuccesfully - in the case of the tongue I ve got flat surface (vertical, laying in the z axis) in the (2D) size of the bounding box mentioned above.. There must exist some tricky way :-)) Thanks very much for help or any advice!

'I am also suprised that I cant export OBJ using Habware MAXOBJ PlugIn from MAX 3.1 properly' I'm not surprised in the least. I've always had trouble with OBJ from max. That's why I use 3ds all the time now. I'm sorry I can't answer your question, but I don't understand it. A bounding box should only cover the area of the object and no more. If it's bigger, maybe there's a stray polygon in there somewhere. That's the only thing I can think of. mac

*'I am also suprised that I cant export OBJ using Habware MAXOBJ PlugIn from MAX 3.1 properly'* I'm surprised, too, and I've been surprised all the time that Mac has a problem with it. I use the HABWare export for sending thigns to poser exclusively and never have a problem, and I recommend it. These are the settings I use for export. If the object is not going to be posable, I generally set Group By to 'All to Default'. If I haven't done any UVMapping I untick Texture Co-ordinates. Otherwise I leave these settings as-is and I never have a problem besides the occassional degenerate facet, which is almost always something I did wrno gin the mesh, and occassionaly the fact that spheres made as .5 hemispheres don't make Poser happy. And -- well, you've seen what I can do, right?

Oh - yeah -- I also always Export Selected, not just Export.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1100434

:-) Marco

dodger, You wouldn't be surprised if you knew some of the weird things my computer does. LOL. Yep, your setting look pretty standard. There's always been some argument about the '# of digits' box. No one seems to know exactly what the correct # is, and everyone has their own way. But I don't know that it really matters. The main thing is to get the scaling right going into max, then back out again. mac

Below this is an OBJ that makes one of my lightsabre blades. The # of digits is the precision of the float stored. For poser you'll want at least bare minumum 6, and 8 is better. If you have a lower precision, you will get vertices becoming identical, and then that happens you get degenerate facets and things flattening and such. And that's bad. That's also why you encounter less degenerate facets on a 3DS import -- 3DS uses a variable-precision float internally. But at Poser size, using an OBJ, you'll want 8 places worth of float precision elsewise things will come out wonky. Notice the float precision:

>>>>>>12345678>>>12345678>>>12345678
v  -0.34185275 0.71801335 0.09689700

And consider that those are the same units that Poser uses and what happens when you translate something even .0001 and you can see it just fine... A degenerate facet occurs most often when you have four vertices making up a triangle. Poser doesn't grok it so it black them out. This happens when you have a very thin tapered quad in Max and on export he precision isn't high enough and the two close vertices end up with identical so-ordinates. One thing to note -- the HABWare OBJ2MAX importer deals with these well and fuses them, making the quad into a tri. You can then re-export it with the degenerate facets fixed right up. Other problems that can occur is when things end up flattening out that weren't supposed to. That could be the problem sometimes. Now, if I had a wish, it would be for something (maybe an add-ion for UVMapper) that would tell you which vertices were which. B^) Then you could easily make new body parts that would weld properly with other body parts and make centauring much easier. # Max2Obj Version 4.0 Mar 10th, 2001 # mtllib ./blade_for_lightsabre.mtl g # object (null) to come ... # v -0.34185275 0.71801335 0.09689700 v -0.38656032 0.71801335 0.07108507 v -0.34185275 1.00007522 0.09689702 v -0.38656035 1.00007522 0.07108509 v -0.34185275 0.71801335 0.07108507 v -0.38656035 0.71801335 0.09689700 v -0.34185275 1.00007522 0.07108508 v -0.38656032 1.00007522 0.09689702 v -0.36420652 0.71801341 0.10980299 v -0.36420652 0.71801341 0.05817911 v -0.36420655 1.00007522 0.10980298 v -0.36420655 1.00007522 0.05817910 # 12 vertices

vt  0.00049955 0.00049958 0.50000000
vt  0.99949920 0.00049955 0.50000000
vt  0.00050077 0.99950051 0.50000000
vt  0.99950045 0.99950039 0.50000000
vt  0.00049955 0.00049958 0.50000000
vt  0.99949920 0.00049955 0.50000000
vt  0.00050077 0.99950051 0.50000000
vt  0.99950045 0.99950039 0.50000000
vt  0.00049955 0.00049958 0.50000000
vt  0.99949920 0.00049955 0.50000000
vt  0.00050077 0.99950051 0.50000000
vt  0.99950045 0.99950039 0.50000000
# 12 texture vertices

g (null)
usemtl Lightsabre_Blade
f 1/1 2/2 4/4 3/3
f 5/5 6/6 8/8 7/7
f 9/9 10/10 12/12 11/11
# 3 faces

g

Here I've prepared an image to demonstrate. The bottom half is rendered, the top half is unrendered in smooth shaded mode. The object in question is the same object. A sphere with some extruded faces, split with a slice plane on those faces and again extruded on ona poly. The last extruded poly (the sticky-out bit) was then scaled way down on the Y axis to better demonstrate the importance of the # of digits setting - I deliberately pushed for a degenerate facet. The only difference between the objects was the number of digits used to export it with the HABware exporter. The number used is shown below the unrenders (above the rendered). I've also pointed out the degenerate facetsI deliberately created that didn't happen with a setting of 10 (higher than I normally use, of course) Think of the 'number of digits' as 'Resolution' in a way. No, I don't know what the thingy is supposed to be. Nopte that at 1 digit, the whole thing collapses into a flat plane and all the facets are degenerate. 2 is really ugly, too. 3 is doable because of Poser's auto-smoothing but the degenerate facet is there and would have to be fixed. The strange appearance of the shadow on the sticky-out-bit is because I left my ligth maps at 256. A higher map setting wuold take care of that, as would changing the scale of the shadow cam.

Oh yeah, I also flattened the bottom of the sphere.

Poser's 3DS import converts to 6 digits. Poser's built-in ball is up to 10 digits but uses variable floats. Dork and Mike are both 6 digits, as are Vicki 2 and Posette. Eve is 8. 3DXploration seems to create 8 digit OBJs as well. Anton's Dragon Skeleton is 8 digits.

This image demonstrates the kinds of facets Poser can handle. Poser deals with tris and quads fine, but doesn't like polys. It also flakes on degenerate polys of any sort, which occur when a facet, as defined in the obj as being drawn from a given set of vertices, contains two identical vertices. I've left the vertices in the example one slightly seperate, but that's just for demonstration purposes. In reality the two shown would have the exact same co-ordinates and thus form a triangle of four points. Makes poser flip out and render the whole thing black.

While tris are the most 'stable' shapes, quads will make your OBJ smaller and work fine provided the digits are high enough. Of course, the figits being higher will also make your mesh bigger (more bits per vertex), but the object will still have a lower poly count and render faster at least (because once Poser has it in memory it's using a short or long float, as necessary, to store it in memory, and this your hardware is the limit on resolution, and the bits used to store the number get much less)

well I don't know about how to change the size of the bounding box. But Dodger, that was fascinating! LOL Now I understand degenerate facets and what the number res thing is for. Thank you :))

Thanks, dodger. Excellent explanation. I'll file this for reference. So, by importing 3ds into poser, the default actually becomes 6 digits. And looking at a few obj files, poser's own obj export also seems to default at 6, as opposed to uv mapper's 8 digits. Everything I make goes through these 3 steps. 3ds to poser obj to uv mapper obj (saved without normals), then used as external Geom. OK. Now a question. Pretty much everything I make, which is all furniture and non-organic stuff, goes through uv mapper and I use split vertices on it. Is it worth my while using the 'weld vertices' option on everything too? I check frequently for degenerate facets and never seem to find any. But will welding first, then splitting, help in any way, either in model improvement or file size? I've tried it before and using lose a few vertices, but since I don't really know what it's doing, I'm leary of using it on a regular basis. mac PS 'Poser doesn't grok it' LOL. Been reading 'Stranger in a strange land'?

Thank you for replay, all your advices and reasons and esp. great explanation :-) To date I am using the 3DS format from export from MAX to Poser exclusivelly, but the OBJ may be better solution for some options in the MAXOBJ export dialog to have more control over export by the way, ability to interpret 4 vert poly s like quads (ie conversion of tri to quads) maybe great thing in the MAX usage, when you need to create some low-poly model and polygon numbers quantity is critical. The great disadvantage of MAX is his unability to use 1 quad like 1 face (every quad element is consisted from 2 triangle faces..) I think that I (mybe) doing something wrong in the finalisation of the mesh (perhaps somethinfg related to UVW applying) but when I export like 3DS with checked option "Preserve texture coords" everything is OK. The 3DS is easily importable into Poser and then exportable like correct OBJ yet.

Mac said: Is it worth my while using the 'weld vertices' option on everything too? I check frequently for degenerate facets and never seem to find any. But will welding first, then splitting, help in any way, either in model improvement or file size? Technically, welding identical vertices will shrink the OBJ file a bit, but it's not something you want to do generally speaking. Consider the shape I demonstrated with... in MAX, I detached the facets (polys) for the cylindrically-shaped extrusion bit, as well as the facets on all sides of the 'beak' looking part. Detaching liek this splits the vertices where they were shared before detaching (I then re-attached them). You can also select individual vertices and click 'break' in Max to split them. However, I avoid that because I often don't want a veretex split from from all the facets it takes part in, but only some. 'Split vertices' splits all of the facets and will make a Poser render look unsmoothed (like what happens in MAX when you add a smooth modifier without defining any smooth groups or using Autosmooth). Weld vertices will, of course, undo all of any splitting you do. That will make Poser try to smooth around square corners and such. You can actually get a good approximation of how Poser will render a mesh in Max by doing the following: 1) add a smooth modifier 2) set it to Autosmooth 3) tick the no indirect smothing box 4) set the smooth angle to 180 When you render, the result will look much like it will in Poser. If you select all vertices and click 'break' and render, you can see what it will look like in poser with 'split vertices' in UVMapper. If you seelct all vertices and click 'weld' you will see what it will look like in Poser with the 'weld vertices' option in UVMapper OR with the 'weld vertcies' box ticked when you import it into Poser. Furniture will generally be okay split, but not always -- sometimes even furniture should have some orgnic or round parts. A papasan chair would be very organic and look weird faceted. Actualyl, most any chair will have cushions which are rounded and organic and should be smoothed. Sofas are obvious, as are chaise longes. Round tables shouldn't have faceted sides (though I'd certainly seperate off and reattach the tabletop itself, as well as the bottom). Actually, just looking aruond at my furniture in real life, I can see one cheapo Target bookshelf that split vertices wouldn't hurt, and that's it. Everything else has some kind of moulding, roundness, or cushioning. Even my computer's case and my desk lamp and the computer desk itself (which has rounded corners on top, plus 'button' type thingies over the screws). Been reading 'Stranger in a strange land'? L I use the word 'grok' all the time. Haven't read that in years. Great book though! Den said: but the OBJ may be better solution for some options in the MAXOBJ export dialog to have more control over export by the way, ability to interpret 4 vert poly s like quads (ie conversion of tri to quads) This is a very important aspect of it, in my opinion, not judt because it can as much as halve your polys, but also because it makes it a lot easier to read the UVMap projections. In addition, the # of digits control as I described above can give you much finer resolution that the 6-digit 3DS import in Poser. Finally, it's also a bit simpler because to properly distribute a prop or character, you do not want your OBJ data inside the PP2 or CR2 file, but in an external file, so you would have to re-export an OBJ anyway and it saves tyou a step. You also do not want to have a scale-keyed object in Poser because at the amounts of scaling required to import a normal 3DS object, unless you scaled it down in Max first, you will be dealing with a horribly off-kilter and misaligned prop for the rotation settings, whereas a 1:1 scale object will be much easier to set the rotation centre and such correctly on.

Your best exercise it to make an OBJ in four forms -- Raw, Split, Welded, and split-then-welded. Import them all twice - once with 'Weld Vertexes' (sic) ticked and once without, set all 8 up next to one another and compare the renders and sizes and decide what's best for the item.

Something else to note: UVMapper has a limitation in that, as it's name implies, it's really only a UV mapper. MAX is capable of UVWmapping, which is one dimension better, though that much harder to ahem grok. Notice on the lightsabre blade:

vt  0.00049955 0.00049958 0.50000000

That last datum is 0.5 and will always be when it comes out of UVMapper. Why? Because UVMapper doesn't deal with 3-dimensional textures. A bitmap (be it BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, IFF, TGA, or whatever) only uses 2 dimensions. What difference does this make to Poser? None at all. Poser doesn't deal with the W aspect of a UVWMap either. However, in MAX itself, you can create materials with more complex mapping, as there are several 3-D map types (like falloww, marble, and noise, just to name a few) which are mathematically defined shapes (marble is a fractal) which actually have depth as well as width and breadth. This is why a marble map applied as a planar UVW map will show a different texture on the sides, but a bitmap applied thruogh a planar map will have 'stretching' where the front and back look fine but the sides seem to streak back. The W information is the same all the way along. However, a UVMapper item will never be able to utilise these textures.

Thanks, dodger. Lots of good info there. I kinda figured welding would be a no-no, but thought I'd ask. On the subject of square vs rounded furniture, I agree with you. The pieces I split are generally things like doorframes, windows, and other things that have hard edges in real life. What I do, for example, with tables is, export a square chamfered box from max as the table-top. That gives me a rounded table. I then set the chamfer to zero and export it, and use it as a morph. That way the user can have round or square edges. This works with a lot of things. I make crossbars for windows with a taper modifier, then remove the taper and use that as the MT. It's an easy way of making morphs and pretty effective. mac