Problem creating a belt in 3d studio max

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a belt in 3d studio max, and I'm pretty new to the program so I apologise in advance if I seem like a complete noob!

I'm using the Prim Composer plugin, and from that I'm using a nurbs cylinder. What I did was got the basic belt shape by shrinking down the X and Y axis appropriately, then I stretched it along the Z axis so I had a long, thin and mostly flat cylinder. I then curved off the top and the bottom to give it a nice rounded look. Finally I positioned it and started to wrap it around the AV mesh that I'd imported. Here is a picture of how it looks while I'm working on it, and as you can see it's nice and smooth etc: http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/8994/beltk.jpg

Although, this is how it turns out: http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/594/belt2m.jpg

As you can see, it's developed weird bumps and changes to the geometry. I checked beforehand by looking at the mesh of the object and it looks fine...

Soo.. I wanted to ask if anyone could tell me what is happening here? Is this down to limits on what you can do with stretching/manipulating certain sculpty shapes?

I also saw a post about blender, using a torus and ripping the seems, is that the way I should go about creating the shape in 3d studio max? If so, does anyone know where I might find a tutorial on that subject please?


Thanks for reading, any help would be really appreciated!

You don't have to tell us you are new. You have to be If you are using NURBS in Max.
On top of that, you lose one of the benefits of using Prim Composer for generating sculpt maps: vertex level accuracy.

Having said all that though, the model in your screen shot looks like regular old polygons to me, so it's hard to say what you got going on there. When you go into subobject mode do you see vertex, lines, faces, etc, or do you see CV and Surface options?

Regardless, there are a few general things that could be causing your problems you should get in a habit of checking on. I'll try to outline the usual suspects for you. If these don't cover your problem then I would need elaboration on the issues you are having.

Make sure you are uploading with lossless turned on. I have a few straps that I made in the days before lossless, and boy do they look bumpy.

Make sure that True Color is turned off in Customize > Preferences > Rendering. If it's on it will introduce artifacts in your renders that will translate to inaccuracies (bumps) in your sculpt map when you generate it.

If you have "proportional" on or have adjusted the multiplier then could be dealing with fewer possible vertex positions. This could lead to those bumps if the verts positions are getting rounded to two different positional "slots" on a smooth surface.

If you have scaled or have a stack full of modifiers operating on your mesh make a copy and collapse all the modifiers. Then use Reset Xforms (found in the Utility tab) on your objects before generating maps.

That's all the general stuff I can think of right now. Try posting this issue up in the Prim Composer forums. Also, did you check out the video tutorials on the Prim Composer site on how to set up and use Prim Composer?


edit: "ripping seams" sounds like splitting the torus mesh object at the loop where the UV boarders meet. Basically it would convert the torus to a cylinder. In edit poly mode select a loop and then use "split" in the Edit Edge options. This assumes you know how to find UV boarders. Adding the UV Unwrap modifier will show you the boarders if you add it and have "show seam" checked.