3dsmax 7

#1 It says no bounding box found.
i think im not doing something right.

iv looked over the doc's i didnt see anything about bounding box.

#2 Hey Josh,

I'm not sure if there is a plugin for Max 7, but for 6 you need to include a box that defines the bounds of your character (aptly named 'Bounds') I parent that to the 'base01' node. Also, make sure your mesh has a number appended to it (like 'monster2' instead of just 'monster'). The number defines the size in pixels when that mesh will be used in the game engine. If there is no number then the exporter may think that there are no objects to export.

Cheers,
Paul Mikulecky
Lost Pencil Animation Studios Inc.
http://www.lostpencil.com

"The art of character animation is to try
to catch lightning in a bottle.... one volt
at a time." Brad Bird

#3 @Paul

Plugins that were compiled for Max 6 should work flawlessly in Max 7. As such the DTS exporter does function in Max 7 and operates exactly the same as it did before (just now you get all the cool features of 7 to work with too).

@Josh

It sounds like you haven't read any of the documentation yet regarding how to work with the DTS exporter, I recommend that you do as it will save you a lot of frustration and likely a head of hair too.

#4 The exporter for Max 6 and 7 can be downloaded on the Torque Artists Page (link on right hand bar). There is a link to the documentation, I suggest you read the section on bounding boxes - and the rest of the scene heirarchy, such as detail markers.

#5 Yup just exported my first model from Max (just started a max class, have been using blender until now)... and while the professor was going over materials I took a chess character (my pawn with two swords ;) ) and exported it with the plugin from the page Alex linked to... in about 10 - 15 min I had a max exported model with textures in the game... though I forgot to consider scale and my pawn ended up being over 10,000 feet tall lol... my orc was smaller than the hilt on one of his swords...

next step is exporting it as a full character... after scaling that is... adding a collision mesh and cutting down the polys from 6500 lol

but I can vouch it works, freshly installed 3dMax 7 last week, copied over the plug in , followed the "SimpleShape" tutorial... worked like a charm

#6 Thanks Matthew. I am glad that things went smoothly for you.

Tim and I use the exporters from Maya and Max on a daily basis. We can vouch that they work as well. Since the exporting process has not been changed since the docs were written, they are certainly still up to date.

Please make certain that you read them carefully - the scene heirarchy is very specific, but it works that way for very specific reasons. Yes, we could probably make the exporter spit out anything you threw at it, but the way it works now makes it easy to be sure that any content going through the export is set up correctly and won't cause problems when integrated with scripts and code. If you ever work on a commercial Torque product, you'll be very glad for the specificity when trying to determine if a bug in your game is code-side or art-side.

#7 .fx shaders would not be used with TGE or TSE, TSE supports hlsl shaders, though.