Online model purchasing

[Anonymous]

Hey all. I have many problems, especially with textures, when importing models from various online sites. Even though you are thinking you are getting a great 3DS file model (or FBX for example), textures become a big hassle. When The model imports into MAX (sometimes it doesn’t!) the textures do not. When I try to use the Material editor to get a texture from its supplied folder frequently it just doesn’t import. Or the model comes in with dozens of objects but there is no way of linking up the object to the texture supplied. That’s also because there is frequently no description on the file. You’d think the modeler would o a better job specifically naming textures!!! Especially when you pay for it. Eye matching this problem with a pic reference is rather cumbersome. Any thoughts? thanks

[loganfoster]

When one applies a texture to a map channel for the material, the location of the texture is often hard coded and based on the local hard drive that it comes from. As such your HDD structure can obviously be very different than the HDD structure that the author had for it. Unfortunately there is no perfect way to get around this and it is something that every 3D progam I have used on the market suffers from (and an unnecessary part of the "fix up purchased art"), but there are a few ways to make your life easier in 3DS Max for when this happens.

One quick method I have found to get around this is that 3DS Max is often smart enough to search the directory of the .Max file for any missing bitmaps that it needs first. You can also try to setting a common directory that the bitmaps are in for the project in the Paths area of 3DS Max as well using a common directory for the Project. 

Now with all that said you also need to take into consideration that some older file formats store data in different ways. For example the .3DS format I believe uses an older 8.3 format of file names (8 character max for the name, 3 characters max for the extension) and this might throw out any possibility of having the software find the bitmaps automatically.

I hope that that can work for you and help make things a bit easier.