Sudden Transformation of Object topology across saves

[thelogicmatrix]

I was making a gun in 3ds, one of the objects is the frame and grip of the gun. So I was getting ready to set it up for render so I tossed on a placeholder material and then exported it. So something of note, I fist noticed the issue when I wither before or after placing on the material, but definitely when I turned on High def lighting. The oddest thing is that I tried to recover some of my work by heading back to an autosave. However, the issue has seemed to corrupt the prior version by some way or another. The screenshot without the material was taken 10 minutes before the issue occurred and the autosave happened 30 minutes before the issue appeared. The last image is that of the autosave loaded up with the issue. I have saved the autosave file with the hope that maybe it's a program issue rather than actually loss of work. 

Okay, edit. I remember the exact way the issue propagated. I tried to export the file with turbosmooth and then realised turbosmooth wasn't working. Also lucky thing is that I found the exported file so at the very least I should ba ble to turbosmooth that and get my file back.

[10DSpace]

@thelogicmatrix 

Those anomalies you show with Turbosmooth applied are most likely due to topology/mesh errors inadvertently created during modeling.    Remove Turbosmooth and in the areas showing distortion, carefully check for duplicate and/or unwelded vertices and or poor topology (overlapping polygons or more vertices and edges than you need in a very small  area).   You can remove isolated vertices with the backspace key (Note that "remove" is different than "delete").  For duplicate vertices (2 or more vertices occupying the same space), you select the duplicates and weld with a low threshold value like the default of 0.1 or even .01).    In my experience the  distortions you show are 99% of the time due to mesh/topology areas and Turbosmooth is very good at revealing them even if the non-subdivided version of the mesh looks OK.  

[thelogicmatrix]

It definately wasn't a turbosmooth issue. Removing the layer didn't do a thing.

[10DSpace]

@thelogicmatrix 

Sorry, if it wasn't clear to you, but I did not say that it was a turbosmooth issue (although turbosmooth is good at revealing the underlying mesh/topology errors that I believe you have.)     

I said that the anomalies you are seeing are most likely mesh/topology errors (my best guess is extra, duplicate and/or unwelded vertices) in the base mesh, below the level of turbosmooth.   So, I recommend that you remove turbosmooth to work on the base mesh to correct these errors.   Note that you may not see anything obviously wrong in the base mesh with turbosmooth removed, but you still need to go in and clean up the mesh errors in the base mesh.  If you do clean up the base mesh, then when you later re-apply turbosmooth, it should work fine without causing distortion.   If you are still having difficulty, then post your max file here and I will take a look and try to show you what I mean and/or figure out what is going on.   If you decide to post your max file please save it as Max 2020 or earlier, as I do not have Max 2021 installed. 

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[thelogicmatrix]

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. There are no issues with the turbosmooth. The mesh below is a mess. It had good topology before and looks like it was hit with a quadify or something.

[10DSpace]

@thelogicmatrix 

OK, so now that I see that we are in agreement that the base mesh is a mess, do you have any questions or are you just planning to use the exported file you found to reconstruct what you need?