OgreMax Scene Exporter for 3DS Max - Common Problems

Common Problems

- OgreMax materials don't function correctly after the File->New Scene is called - Using 'New Scene' in 3DS Max will cause problems when using OgreMax materials because the materials are left behind, but the resource locations - which are stored in the scene data - are not. If you need to clear the scene, using File->Reset instead.
- Mirrored objects are not exported correctly - Generally, you should not use the 3DS Max Mirror tool to create objects since the transforms of such objects cannot be translated to Ogre format. If you really need to mirror a mesh, perform an Edit Mesh within 3DS Max, select all the vertices of the mesh, then perform a non-linear scale of -100 along whatever axis you'd like to mirror along. This can be achieved most easily using the Scale Transform Type-In. The key point is to mirror the mesh itself, not the node that contains it.
- Merging 3DS Max scenes that contain OgreMax settings doesn't work - When merging other 3DS Max scenes, you must merge the entire scene (including the OgreMax scene settings object it contains).
- You exported a scene, loaded it in an OgreMax viewer, and see nothing other than the background color - Check these things:
  1. Make sure you have created at least one camera in your scene - This ensures there is a camera in an expected location. Otherwise a default camera location and direction will be used, which probably isn't what you want.
  2. Manually set the far clip distance for the cameras - By default, 3DS Max disables manual clipping for cameras, but the exporter always exports them. You must manually set the camera clip distances to include the parts of the scene you wish to see.
  3. If you're using a scene created by someone else, make sure the objects/skeletons/transformations/whatever-else aren't poorly made - You will find lots of 3DS Max scenes floating around on the Internet that were not created with the intent of being exported from 3DS Max and loaded into a graphics engine such as Ogre 3D. Many of these scenes have objects with negative scale transforms, complex bone hierarchies that won't work in Ogre (or any other realtime graphics engine for that matter), or a variety of other problems that no exporter could ever deal with.
- Skeleton animations are not exported - This is most likely because you have not added any mesh animations.
- Node animations are not exported - This is most likely because you have not added any node animations. Pre-2.0 versions of the OgreMax Scene Exporter automatically exported node animations. Newer versions do not, so you must define the animations explicitly.
- Your exported skinned mesh is incorrect - In order to export meshes with skeleton animations correctly, your objects must be of a type that evaluate to a predictable number of vertices. For skeleton animations you will generally be using an editable mesh of some sort so this won't be a problem, but if you are using something else, such as an editable patch, you may end up with results like this:
  As you can see with the figure on the right, the problem can be solved by applying an Edit Mesh modifier to the object. This modifier should be applied before the Physique or Skin modifier in the object's modifier stack.