!Restored: Problem with materials exporting to 3DS

[Anonymous]

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I haven't seen many topics regarding materials when exporting to 3ds so I'm not sure if this is just some silly option I missed or alike, or just nobody cares.

The thing is I've been trying to export a pln [archicad 11] to 3ds, and when I open it with Max 8 all the materials has the 'internal render' settings, nothing of the 'lightwork' settings. So, is something Im doing wrong or just archicad cannot write ligthwork texture info in the 3ds? If so, is there like an external plugin that can make the trick? I've tried the abtraubm [¿?] importing plugin for max but it freeze the program and nothing happens.

Any suggestion? =/ I spend a lot of time making new materials for lightwork.

[ie, I have an alpha channel texture in lightworks tightly adjusted to the base texture that doesnt get imported...]

For a quick answer, thks very much!

PS: Also, I noticed that when I export to 3DS sometimes there are objects missing. Perhaps this just happens for high polygon counts, but it's odd.

[Dwight]

Tough Break.

As you see, the 3Ds export is limited to the basic surface description.

I do not know how you'd transfer LightWorks shader data to Max.

Besides, Max has way more sophisticated materials - why not just take a few minutes to manually rebuild those values?

Missing objects? Hmmmm.

[Anonymous]

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Acht, ok. Yeap, I know max has far interesting materials, is just that I spend a lot of time setting them up in archicad with lightworks and it a shame to let them waste away. But, thks vmuch anyway, I needed to be sure. Guess I have no other choice.

PS: So... maybe it can be worked out in a next version? to export to 3ds with lightworks shaders data??

PS2: Yup, missed objects. But the model has a lot of polygons, so I dont find it so surprising. Another friend told me also that she had some missing objects [different pc], yet a couple days ago I did the exportation again and it all worked out well, so it's not very important.

PS3: Thks again Dwight!

[Karl Ottenstein]

Darius_bd wrote:
PS: So... maybe it can be worked out in a next version? to export to 3ds with lightworks shaders data??

I cannot see that this would be a priority for GS any time soon. A more reasonable workflow is to not expend any effort on LW shaders in AC if your intent is to export to an external renderer, whether it is max, c4d, artlantis or whatever - each of which has more sophisticated (but proprietary and not interchangeable) shader definitions.

Setting up shaders in AC is a tedious, trial and error affair. The only reason to justify the effort required is that you intend to render inside of AC. When that isn't the intent, save your time for max/artlantis/etc.

You can use the same texture, bump and reflectivity map images in all of the different software, but have to set it up in each.

The 3ds file format has a fairly limited 'definition' for a shader/material, and so cannot represent all of the parameters of even Lightworks anyway, from what I can see.

Cheers,
Karl

[Dwight]

When exporting from Archicad, consider material names as mere "tags" to reference the sophisticated surfaces created in recipient rendering applications.