topic Navisworks to 3ds Max (Material quantities are high) in 3ds Max Forum

Navisworks to 3ds Max (Material quantities are high)

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:44:51 GMT

Hello 3ds Max community,

We are working through the process of exporting entities from NavisWorks Manage 2018 into 3ds Max 2018 and we're finding that the scene material count quantities are higher than we'd like (which affects performance in 3ds Max when we're dealing with very large files).

There seems to be a ratio of one scene material per object as per the example below.

NWD > FBX > 3ds Max:

100 3D objects with 10 colors assigned = 100 scene materials (shouldn't it be 10, one for each color?)

I've attached an NWD if anyone would like to test the scenario (100 3D cubes with 10 colors assigned)

1. Open the NWD.

2. Export to FBX (choose any combination of options or go with the defaults).

3. Import FBX into 3ds Max.

4. Save the session.

5. Type in "scenematerials.count" in the MAXScript Listener (it should report 100).

We're aware that we can remove all materials via scripting ($*.mat=null), but then we have to reassign materials to the objects to match the original materials/colors.

Questions (as per the test scenario above):

Is there a way to simplify the FBX import with only the 10 expected materials/colors?

Is there more advanced scripting that can be run post-import to remap materials from 100 to 10?

Thanks,

Tyler

Re: Navisworks to 3ds Max (Material quantities are high)

djwebb — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:55:55 GMT

Hello Tyler (ttpollon)

I have this same issue and decided to give the support line a try. So I forwarded this information as a "support ticket" to Autodesk, and they have indicated that they are going to forward to their development team.

Fingers crossed...

In the meantime, is there anyone out there that is a MaxScript wizard who may be able to help? ie: Autodesk employee?.. anyone?

Regards,

Doug

Re: Navisworks to 3ds Max (Material quantities are high)

eric.craft — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 18:24:29 GMT

I wish my material count was that low. Last one I tested it had well over 23,000+ materials and 33,000+ objects. The worse case on the project was 328,000+ materials and 364,000+ objects.

On top of that Navisworks exports the full hierarchy of objects. If you hide the geometry before export it won't export the mesh, but will still export the hierarchy. In short the issue is on how Navisworks exports the data.

I had to write a few scripts to manage these scene as they were almost unusable in the current scene import. I had also developed other scripts to collapse objects and combine similarly named materials into one Material ID. Unfortunately, I can share any of that code, but do understand your pain.

-Eric

Re: Navisworks to 3ds Max (Material quantities are high)

djwebb — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 03:39:56 GMT

Hi Eric,
Thanks for posting how you were able to work around this. I appreciate that you are not able to share the scripting code. I wonder if you might know of anyone for hire to generate similar code.
Or perhaps there is a member of the Development Team reading this post that also feels the pain, and has an answer...
Regards,
DjWebb