Max 2019 exporting with broken smoothing groups and maybe normals?

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I've been having a recurring issue with Max 2019 where upon export, the smoothing groups of all my models are destroyed.  It seems to set them all to the same group, which sort of kills any sort of hard edges I need to have.  Here's a pic of what that looks like (in substance painter)

Now, I've found a workaround to this which used to make my exports turn out fine.  Essentially, I would add an "Edit Normals" modifier, select them all, and press "make explicit" before exporting.  I must confess, I haven't worked a whole lot with normals and I'm not sure what exactly this does, but it had solved my exporting issues in the past.

Unfortunately, now when I use this method, I seem to get another issue with the normals themselves, picture below (exported back into max, since it displays the problem better).

I asked a couple of friends about this and one said it looked like the models were exporting with flipped normals.  That being said, when I import the models back into Max and go to flip the normals again, it only worsens the problem, so I'm not sure if that's correct (pic below)

Something worth noting is that upon re-importing the models into Max, they all come in as editable meshes.  I don't remember if that's normal or not, but when I apply an edit poly modifier ontop of them, the apparent issue disappears.  If anyone would like to take a look and try exporting it themselves, I attached the 2019 .max file below.  The model I'm trying to export is the platform furthest to the left of the three - not including the grey machine in the middle.

Does anybody have any idea of what could be causing either of these issues and what a potential workaround might be?  I'd really like to not have to reinstall max again, but it's starting to look like I might.  Let me know, thanks.

[Anonymous]

Importing is a slippery slop, because all sorts of issues can arise. Best workflow is to import only what is needed, and save it to a .max file.

That is the standard.

What format are you exporting to? obvious but necessary question: have you managed the export options corrctly? if you have, and everything seems ok, i would try Googling the export format and see what other users have been doing with the options, more information is always good. 😉

i'm not sure what else to offer, except possibly try converting the objects to editable poly, and selecting all faces of an object, and clearing all smooth groups, then reapply smoothing froups, and be attentive to the slots and angles.

Hope you find a solution, please reply with the format type of the export and i could try to replicate and/or solve the issue.