3ds max - Multiple Meshes into 1 - Help

[anon_5240764]

I have a 20k vehicle model built in 3ds max. After building i have many different pieces. Now I have them grouped in max. But that does not combine multiple objects into single when exported.

When i exported to unity, it created a bunch of seperate meshes and materials.

How do I combine multiple meshes into single meshes?? Quickest route. I tried converting to editable poly and then using attach, but this will take forever.

Is there a faster way or a plugin that can help??

Thanks!

[anon_5240764]

Also, using attach distorted some objects like the tires…

[larvantholos]

Depends what kind of combine. Tho, editable poly as you suggested above, would be the quickest you just need to use select by name, instead of just selecting everything manually. You could also do a boolean operation, which would combine them, altho might be unstable and give you unpredictable results.

Note, even if they are one object, if your using multiple materials on the object, its going to create multiple materials when imported into unity, theres no way around that - you can bake your textures into a single texture map however, if you don’t need specific affects from the multiple textures.

[anon_10153730]

You can use attach list and you should check out maxscript help for attach the objects much faster for example $.editablepoly.attach box01 …

[anon_5240764]

Thanks for the help!

[anon_5240764]

@larvantholos

Depends what kind of combine. Tho, editable poly as you suggested above, would be the quickest you just need to use select by name, instead of just selecting everything manually. You could also do a boolean operation, which would combine them, altho might be unstable and give you unpredictable results.

Note, even if they are one object, if your using multiple materials on the object, its going to create multiple materials when imported into unity, theres no way around that - you can bake your textures into a single texture map however, if you don’t need specific affects from the multiple textures.[/QUOTE

I baked into one texture map. If unity creates multiple materials, but they all point to the single baked map, will there still be performance lost??

[anon_64263117]

In 3dsmax you should use collapse. It’s the quickest and simplest way, and you won’t have problems with multiple maps, but it is adviseble only for the nonmoving parts.

[larvantholos]

If they are all the same material, when you import it into unity it will set the same material on all of them. Otherwise you’ll have multiples, you can still manually fix this in unity, but your best bet is if you only need that one material, select them all, select an empty material slot, rename it so you know what it is, and does, and select everyone in your scene that needs this one material, and use the apply to selection and say yes to apply to all selected objects.

[anon_90801531]

As the others have said, use Attach to combine the static meshes. Once attached, you can let max do an auto unwrap and bake a large textures with all of the multi-subObject materials on it. you will get some loss of detail, but it makes handling the mesh lots easier inside Unity. The reason you got distortion of some objects is probably due to linking where one of the parent objects has a non-uniform scale on it.

[pixellegolas]

To merge multiple meshes to one so you also skip the pollies inside you have to use BOOLEAN. BOOLEAN will merge and delete everything inside so it becomes one solid object. ATTACH only “groups” the meshes into a mesh but you still have all the polys inside still shown

[JGattes]

pixellegolas, after more than 4 years your answer still proved useful to me. You are correct: only Boolean really solves the issue in the way people would more often desire. Many thanks for that remark.