Rhino seems to be becoming more and more popular and so is needed more in our workflow. It seems to be one of the hardest models to work with when using 3DS Max because the exports are always so difficult to handle.
What is the best way to make sure things are exported as meshes, by layer and properly welded. more often than not a simple box can come through with 2 normal looking faces for the front and back but the sides will be subdivided a lot and so the whole box wont be welded as a single element but instead you end up with 6 elements in 1 object of a box and unable to weld due to the increased vertices on the side faces
Currently we export as DWG with;
surfaces and meshes to to export as meshes.
lines, arcs, polylines, curves set to splines
polycurves as polylines w/bulge arcs.
then we keep the poly count slider below half way to try and keep some shape in curves but minimise the overall subdivision of flat faces.
the results are always hit and miss. would love for a simpler way to get rhino out clean.
convert your geometry to meshes directly in rhino before exporting. it helps with quality control. export those meshes instead of poly/surfaces
hint: it might be a good idea to get familiar with quadremesh
hint2: get familiar with fbx file format
thanks for the replies. i’ll look into QuadRemesh and using FBX again. OBJ rarely ever works nicely in our workflow and I seem to remember FBX being a little more fiddly than DWG but i’ll try using FBX again.
I think one of the biggest issues is how those boxes export with many subdivides on random faces so that they don’t weld properly. I’m guessing this is because they are poly surface and not mesh?
That no surfaces are welded with mesh exports in Rhino is the reason I don’t use it (I take a roundtrip via Unreal/Omniverse instead), but our Max guy actually likes to use Rhino for exports… but I think he doesn’t care about welding because he just adds materials for renders. But yeah, Rhino doesn’t weld and it’s a bummer.
what does your workflow look like via unreal, do you datasmith it to fix meshes? the welding is very annoying for certain materials and modifiers. If anything uses rounded edges or chamfer. Sometimes glass becomes a real pain also with reflections and refractions breaking.
Yeah, Datasmith welds everything (but note, you get quite different results between 4.x and 5.x… some things are still broken in 5.x). Also I think it ignores curves (never had to convert those to a mesh based application). Layers too get ignored, of course, so at times will go through the hassle of making nested blocks for exports.
I think refraction gets set in the material, because (at least for us) not all models have proper thickness on that…