After 20 years of this nonsense

[pierre]

This drives me absolutely insane.

Get dialog box verbage that's not in the help file.

What the hell????????????????  

rats nest anybody?

[Pac_187]

A quick Google Search turned this up:

"A 'rats nest' is basically a mess of overlapping interconnected edges. [...]"

Original: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-modeling/rats-nest-in-the-mesh/td-p/4837425

You might be able to solve this by welding the vertices on your model with a low threshold value, thus trying to get rid of overlapping vertices.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @pierre and welcome to the community,

As @Pac_187 has mentioned, a rats nest means you have some corrupted or invalid geometry on the model.  If you'd like I can check the model out and let you know where the problem is, but I usually find these problems using the STL Check.  I can create a private folder for you if you prefer it.  

Best Regards,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @pierre,

I just wanted to follow up here, any progress on this issue?

Best Regards,

[jibijib]

There's nothing wrong with your models - the OBJ exporter is just a big load of deprecated crap. I think it dissects the polygons and then assumes your polygons are overlapping because the vertices are absolute on the position.

[pierre]

I know how to use google.  It was not my point.

My point was you autodesk write things in your message boxes that you are unable to put into your help files.

This is, has and always will be unacceptable to me.

It is in my opinion lazy and a slap in the face to paying customers.....  but whatever, people just seem to accept this....

I usually do to, so I just cuss and move on.

You can mark this as closed but don't mark it as an acceptable solution.

Pierre

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @pierre,

I'm sorry if I misunderstood what you were looking for here and I certainly wasn't questioning your Google-Fu.  The term rat's nest is a dated term but there are references to it in the SDK help which it appears was included in 3ds Max 4 about 17 years ago.  The term is used in the class description for PolyObject Class reference as well as in the MNMesh Class reference.  Admittedly that was a separate resource than the generic help for a long time, but as of 2015 it is now connected to the main help so doing a search there should bring it up.  

Additionally, there is a direct definition in the 3ds Max help as shown below.  Does that help?  Would you like me to submit a request to link to this definition in the OBJ exporter area of the help?  

Best Regards,

[jibijib]

Do you absolutely need to export to OBJ? I'd rather export to ASCII than OBJ!

If you import OBJ's into Max, you need to merge it with another object, otherwise it crashes Max if you try to edit it. The scale is also out of whack (by 1000%), all the polys are detached, and the normals are flipped.

As I said, the 17+ year old error message is proof that the exporter/importer hasn't been touched or tested since 2000.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

The importer and exporter was updated and replaced by the Guruware one during... Max 2010 I think.  I don't have any problems editing OBJ's that I've imported.  If you want to make a new thread we can tackle this together, but you've got some problems here that aren't typical. 

Best Regards,

[jibijib]

It depends on the software the OBJ is exported from I suppose - it still crashes Max 100% though, and has done since we started getting OBJ's from outsourcers (2011).

As this is a moan thread, I wish you guys would implement a decent settings backup config that covers all user settings in Max. Having to change everything back to your custom layout by hand is painful and time consuming everytime we have to reinstall Max for whatever reason. The save UI option doesn't cover everything (menus, modifier buttons, etc).

I try saving workspace a few times - but guess what ...

[jibijib]

And random missing things that no one will ever know the answer to ...

[jibijib]

What are these missing things? Why are they here? You have to live with this unfortunately, as nobody seems to know why they do it.

This one is meant to save current settings as default.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @jibijib,

If you'd like I can split your posts out to a new thread and help with each of them one by one.  But I can't just keep answering one off's in this thread like this, it's hard for me to keep track of everything.  I am happy to split these out if you'd like.  I can't just ignore these problems either so it's putting me in a weird position.  

Otherwise, on the customize menu, you can "Save UI Scheme" which does save your menus, toolbars, and etc.  You are likely having those missing menus because your user settings are corrupted.  Try to reset them.  The UI save and load is meant to be used with the same version of 3ds Max, and are not backwards/forwards compatible at this time.  If you are loading your settings from say Max 2014 into 2017, it may cause some problems. 

Poorly formatted .OBJ's may cause a crash likely due to other software not properly formatting the file.  There are some words about this on Guruware's OBJIO page, but I can't copy/paste them here.

If you'd like to go deeper into any of these issues I am happy to help, but I really need each issue in it's own thread.  Thank you for your understanding.  

Best Regards,