Getting some strange behavior with Collada documents

[Anonymous]

Hey!

This will be my first post to the forums. I'm a hobbyist programmer and one of my bits of software is a tool used to convert 3D models from a game called "Spiral Knights" into a Collada / DAE file. You can see the software (here). In the few bug report emails I get from users, one of them had an interesting issue, to say the least.

I use Blender for my small-scale stuff, including testing my software. Naturally, I've only tested it on Blender and haven't tested it on 3DS Max quite yet. The user emailed me telling me that "3DS Max crashes whenever I import my DAE."

Strangely, this DAE will import perfectly into Blender and some other tools that some of my downloaders use (Or so I assume, given that I have no bug reports related to software away from Blender except for the one that prompted me to create this thread.) I HAVE been able to reproduce this issue at my school, which has 3DS Max installed on the machines.

Attached is a freshly exported DAE. My only guess is that it's a formatting issue, like 3DS Max expects some bit of data and can't find it, and perhaps some of you better with 3DS Max could help me out with what it's missing.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community,

I have come across this when developing items for apps on the Mac.  I think you are correct that it is a formatting issue and that *some* apps just don't like the native formatting.  In my case, I used OpenCollada for 3ds Max to get around this issue, and it formatted it more like what XCode wanted to see.  Can you please try that for me?  It's free, but I can't offer much support on it because it's not made by Autodesk.  I do believe this will solve your problem though.  I suppose you could try to find the problem in the .dae by editing it, but I am unsure of the exact data to change.  Open Collada does crash quite a bit in many cases, but it did work out for me in this case.  

I've also had cases where the OC version just wouldn't work but the 3ds Max one worked like a champ.  There is some feature in each that the other doesn't have or support but I am unsure what that is.  With both, you can't go wrong in many cases.  

Best Regards,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

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

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Sorry, I was out of town for that time.

I went ahead and tested importing one of my Collada documents into 3DS Max 2017 and it seemed to work fine without OpenCollada. The attached screenshot is the model - It imported as intended and without any crashes. It did throw a bit of an error at first, which I can link the log file as an attachment as well.

Other than that I think it's working now. I'm unsure of really why this issue occurred at first, perhaps the user who sent me the error is using an older version of 3DS Max?

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

No problem at all, Happy Holidays!  I marked the answer because I was able to import with few issues with OC, but I did have issues with the native importer.  There must be a node in Blender that the exporter isn't sure what to do with, but if it's working now that's great news.  I did also notice that my system units had a bearing on how the file imported, and Inches worked better for me that cm with the original file.  Thanks so much for your update!  

Best Regards,