3DS Max 2014 to SL issues

[Vaene91]

Hi there, I have a mesh that I am trying to export from 3DS Max 2014 and import into SL. The mesh itself works and will appear in the upload screen of SL but it does not show any textures and I have to manually upload the texture and apply it to the mesh. 

I have created UV's for the mesh and the texture is applied to the object in max. Is there something I am doing wrong with exporting the object from max?

Side Note: I should mention that I can login to the Aditi Beta Server and everything works fine. The model imports with textures applied to it and I don't have to upload a seperate texture to get it to work.

[arton Rotaru]

Works for me with Max 2015. Make sure you have ticked the Include Textures checkbox in the Upload options tab of the importer. Even when importing with.slm files.

I never include textures though, because most of the times I have to tweak them several times until they look right in SL. Material maps won't be included anyway.

[Vaene91]

So manually uploading textures seperately would be the better way to go then? I also have tried to get Open Collada to work with max 2014 and it just keeps throwing up errors so I am just using the Autodesk .dae file exporter

[arton Rotaru]

I wouldn't say the better way, at the end it's just a texture upload. You will have to pay the 10 L$ for each texture anyway, regardless of the method. The only thing it safes is the moment it takes to apply the textures in-world manually.

Usually I have to tweak the diffuse, specular, and gloss map several times until I get the desired result in-world. So I use local textures on the mesh at first, and when done, I will have to upload the textures separately anyway, or I would have to pay the price for the mesh again.

I use the built in Autodesk  Collada exporter as well.

The ability to upload textures along with the mesh with exports from 3ds max has been added just recently I think. I never got that to work all the years before. I just tried it again when I saw your post here, and it worked right away for me. I didn't even had to store the textures in the same folder as the dae file.

[Vaene91]

Ah well thankyou for all the information. I guess the way I am doing it is fine

[Drongle McMahon]

Arton mentioned that you have to pay the fee each time you upload the same texture with a modified mesh. There'a another problem too. The uploader doesn't know it's the same texture. So it treats it as a completely new asset, with a new UUID and occupying extra space on the asset server. So it wastes space on the asset server and slows it down. Furthermore, it makes a new copy in your inventory, clogging that up too (it's in a textures folder with the name of the uploaded model). Finally, if you have several versions of an object, or different objects, all using the same texture, in the same scene, where each object had the texture uploaded, then it has to be downloaded from the asset server again for each of the object, as the UUIDs tell the viewer it's a different texture. All these effects are affronts to the general principles of efficient resource re-use. So there are good resource and performance arguments against uploading textures with the models, even if you can ignore the cost argument.