Weird issue with the vertex colors of a 3d model

braisJSL2A — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 21:20:37 GMT

Hi forum 🙂

Nice to meet you all. I'm Brais, and this is my first message on this forums. I wanted to reach out to the community today as I've encountered an issue with the vertex colors of a particular model on which I'm working that I don't know how to fix. As a summary, the vertices of the model in question have different colors assigned to them - just two, red and green. This is easily seen if I toggle the Vertex Channel Display option under Object Properties > Display Properties.

In spite of that, I can't for the life of me get a hold of those values beyond that visualisation toggle. In 3ds Max, assigning a standard material with a vertex color map as the diffuse value doesn't show the right result, as seen next:

Outside of Max, using this model as a high poly source from which we can bake the vertex colors onto a low detail model fails as well - I've tried to do so using both Substance Painter and xNormal to no avail - it seems like the vertex color texture stays with no information at all in xNormal, and Substance Painter is a bit more weird in that the color of the resulting texture stays uniform, but it seems to inherit the color of the diffuse value of the material used when the model was exported as an fbx.

I was able to replicate the problem on two different versions of 3ds Max, both 2022 and 2019, so I'm under the impression that there must be something wrong with the model - as opposed to this being a bug with Max itself.

I'd like to include the model in case anyone can take a look and point me in the right direction, I've used vertex colors all of the time to bake information from high poly meshes, and I don't understand why this is failing now.

https://we.tl/t-UUx8u9oKkQ

Thanks in advance for your time reading this,

Brais

Re: Weird issue with the vertex colors of a 3d model

joescarr — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:38:24 GMT

This post was from years ago... but... we had the same problem today.

Turns out .abc will store the vertex colors (and possible other vertex color channels) that prevent VertexPaint modifier from working "correctly".

To resolve... re-export to a new .abc but un-tick so it doesn't export Vertex Colors (possibly some of the other Custom channels).

Works here now...

topic Weird issue with the vertex colors of a 3d model in 3ds Max Modeling Forum

Weird issue with the vertex colors of a 3d model

Re: Weird issue with the vertex colors of a 3d model