3ds max (2022) exporter bugs

[DanielSwahn]

As of 3ds max exporter v20220210.4 I have noticed a range of possible bugs that makes working through 3ds max tedious and sometimes impossible. I will try and explain each behavior to see whether it is a bug or that I have missed something.

• First issue is that the model path in the exporter seems to get confused when previous export has been made to a network location:

It means that if you close the exporter window and open it up again the path now consists of a local path plus the network path, and this cannot be used. Because the path is invalid to begin with it will default to a documents folder where you have to re-navigate to the folder you actually want to export to. This happens EVERY time, and constantly modifying the output path quickly becomes highly annoying.

• Second issue is that the exporter doesn’t seem to bake baseColor/albedo colours from materials with the right gamma. For example, if I have a Physical Material with a texture applied to the transparency weight, it bakes the baseColor and opacity texture together. This wouldn’t be an issue if the exporter manages to get the gamma correct.

The current workaround I’ve found is to manually apply a 2.2 gamma correction to the Base Color of the Physical Material to compensate. I have not changed any gamma settings inside 3ds max. Annoying having to correct this all the time.

• Third issue seems to be that when exporting to GLB I can only export one set of BaseColor+Opacity texture. In my scene I have one untextured material and one opacity-mapped decal texture as in the image above. I then add a third material using another opacity texture, but after export both opacity-mapped materials use the same baked texture which yields the wrong result for one of the materials. I can see in the Babylon sandbox viewer that the file contains two textures, but they both look the same (thus one of them is incorrect). Is this a bug, or is there a limitation that I am unaware of? Embedding multiple textures should not really be an issue, right?

• Forth issue is with the Babylon material settings found under the materials.

When pushing the Add Normal bump(s) attributes button, in the Compact Material editor it yields an error:
“No ““showProperties”” function for undefined”, and in the Slate Editor nothing happens at all. I assume this should not be the case?

I’m using 3ds max 2022.2

[sebavan]

@Guillaume_Pelletier is our exporter GURU and he ll be able to help with those issues

[DanielSwahn]

I can also add that loading Physical Materials from library files doesn’t seem to carry Babylon Attributes correctly. If I load materials from a library it seems like the exporter does not respect/recognize the settings in the loaded materials. Things like Unlit, Backface Culling and Transparency Mode.

By recreating the material within the scene it seems that the material Babylon Attributes are recognized. But as you can imagine if you have a lot of materials it becomes completely cumbersome to having to recreate all materials every time you create a new scene.

However, I think the bugs listed in the original post might be related to this phenomenon, as I am often saving and loading material libraries between scenes.

Edit: Seems like reloading the scene fixes this issue. Might be good to know about it though.

[Guillaume_Pelletier]

Hello,
The Babylon plugin leverage the storage of attributes BY SCENE only.
We have put on our ehancement list the way to get a Local preference file to manage options by user/usage other than by Max Scene.
Could you send us a file which highlight the 2 and 3 issues ( in the exporter we try to re-use texture as much as possible, then our simple uniqueness KEY system may failed in certain case we do not meet so far).
Issue 4 might be 2022 related, i will check for this.
I will also try to reproduce the network path issue.

[carolhmj]

Hi @DanielSwahn just checking in, are you able to provide the files that Guillaume asked for?