Importing scupted from 3ds max, getting weird shapes

I'm importing sculpted prims from 3ds max via the method of "Creating Scuplties from Abitrary Meshes" tutorial. I'm getting the same crazy offshoot in every single mesh I try to upload, a few vertexes way out from the mesh dragging long planes. In every mesh it's in the same spot. Any ideas of a fix or what I am doing wrong? The meshes are editable meshes projected. I have a screen shot of my texture (which doesn't look like the one in the tutorial (another possible reason this could be happening...) When I followed the "Solidify, then invert" steps, the mesh had many more of these crazy vertexes out there. Maybe I'm not doing something right. I have Solidify A, B, and C (I used A..it doesn't say which.), and when I Image > Adjustments> Invert, nothing seems to happen. I know I'm doing something wrong. >__<

Anyway if anyone recognizes a mistake I've made in the process. Also, does the mesh appear like it should in the preview before you upload it? I kept getting weird shapes and when I build the sculpt it only had one rather than a big ball of mess.

Thanks
Cynster

SCREENSHOT: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v190/dasibbie/whatsupwiththis.jpg

Your problem is the sawtooth on the top and bottom of your map.

If your map is solid color then Solidify won't work (use Solidify A by the way). It works by filling the transparent areas between textures. The quickest way would be to render out to a .png with alpha (but any texture with an alpha will work) and run the filter on that.

You can also get around this issue by using a modified "spherical" cylinder as your projection object. Make a cylinder with the appropriate segments, delete the caps, then add a Spherify modifier. Then you can make a reference sphere align the cylinder to that and collapse or add an Edit Poly modifier to the cylinder. Then go into edge or vertex mode and with the edge edge constraints space the loops of the cylinder to those of the sphere. A second spherify might be needed as well.

On second thought, just go with the alpha texture way...

I would recommend getting Prim Composer http://liferain.com/downloads/primcomposer/ and using the SculptGenMax component for importing the maps back into Max for quality checking.

Thanks so much! I'll try that out. I do have the prim composer, but it doesn't work very well when I try to edit the shapes on there. I'll keep toying with that. Thanks so much for the texture help, I knew it had to be related to that.

No problem, just looking out for my Max peeps.

Edit: if you are having problems with Prim Composer you can always get answers on the forums there. Shack Dougall provides great support.

Okay, will do! I'm glad you're looking out for the 3ds Max modders, there's a lot of lacking support in Oblivion communities xD

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EDIT: Finally everything is in game somewhat correctly. The saw cut was fixed when I exported as a tga and manually selected and deleted the black triangles on the layer and used solidify. for some reason when I saved it as a png it wouldn't save back into a tga file.

It's still very low detail and isn't shaped exactly how I would like it to be, but it was an umbrella and I'll try more organic shapes to see if they work better. I'll also look on the prim composer website to see how to edit the prims to get the results I want.

Sounds like you are getting a handle on the process. The arbitrary mesh creation method produces general approximations of the mesh you are sampling. This is okay for low to medium frequency detail, but if you are looking for higher resolutions you be better served by using SculptGenMax. I've attached a sphere with a cylinder UV space that you can use as the projection point for the mesh creation process you are using. It should alleviate the need to get rid of the sawtooth in PS.

You can upload .png files to SL, but if you switch from 16 to 8 bits per channel you can save them as tga files. You will have to manually create an alpha channel if you wanted one though.

Don't be afraid to ask Prim Composer questions here as well. I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability. But like I said, Shack is good at answering questions on his forum and he's the application/script developer so he knows what he's talking about.

edit: I removed the zip file - the mesh had bad UVs. Will upload new one if LL can manage to fix the "slight problem" with the database.

Okay ^^ I'll try out the sculptGenMax method. Thank you so much for the file and all of your help! I really appreciate it. How did you UV map the sphere to have a cylinder UV map space, just for future reference?

I cheated and exported a sphere out of ZBrush. ZBrush spheres are just cylinders with pinched ends that are, well, spherical. That makes them well suited for sculptie work.

oh wow, I didn't know that. Do you import scuplties out of zbrush? Is it more complicated than 3ds max?

2k Suesei has done up a ZBrush exporter /8/d5/260272/1.html Is it less/more complicated? It depends on what you find complicated about Max I guess. There seemed to be a lot fewer options the last time I checked it.

There's a few tutorials up in the sticky at the top of the forum by Vlad on setting up ZBrush for sculptie work too.