Newbie issues with welding and Images on planes.

[Anonymous]

First question is about images on planes.  Every time I do it, it seems to take me a long time of trying things before I finally am able to get the images to show up on the planes. I think that will get easier as I do it a few more times, and figure out exactly what is causing me problems.   But once I have a couple of planes set up with images, and save and close the file, the next time I open the file the planes and images are invisible.   After a while I found that by changing one viewport to Shaded materials with maps the images showed up.  But it didn't work on other viewports.  I finally got them all working by changing to High Quality.     Why when I open a file am I not able to see them the same as I was able to when I closed the file?

Second problem, is similar to a recent post, but thought it would be better to start my own thread.  I have been trying to follow a you tube tutorial that is in a foreign language and very blury screen.  Basically I started with a plane, turned it into a editable poly and have been dragging edges to make a doughnut shape.  Then I drew a line and made it rectangular and gave it some width.  Then turned it into a editable poly.  I am now trying to join the two objects and have tried welding vertexes, and edges, and target welding, and joining them into one object and retrying all the weld and bridge options.  Nothing will connect between them. At one point I thought maybe the normals were messed up on the line, so I started from scratch on it, but I still am not able to make any kind of connection between the two.  Anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong? 

[hagen.deloss]

Hi @Anonymous 

Thanks for coming to the 3ds Max forums with your questions!

Viewports not displaying materials

1. Short answer, Max should be saving your viewport settings when you save. When you apply an image to a material it will show in the viewport, as long as you enable Show Shaded Material in Viewport when you apply the material in either the Slate or default Material editors, the icon looks like this.

 Like you noted, the viewport must also be set to "default" view, or flat color, as opposed to Wireframe or clay.

If you then save that scene, that view should save as the default view for when you open the scene again. If those properties aren't saving, we can continue troubleshooting to determine the cause.

Attaching 2+ objects into 1

2. When connecting 2 objects in 3ds Max, you will need to first convert both objects to an editable poly. Then use the attach tool to make them into one object. 

1. right click the object you want to convert
2. at the bottom of the menu, select Convert To > Convert to Editable Poly
3. Within your Command Panel > Modify tab, select the Attach button 
4. Select the mesh you want to combine
5. the two objects will connect, and their vertices can now be wielded together

I hope this information helps, and please let me know what I can do to clarify and help further!

Talk soon,

[Anonymous]

Here is a simple example of what I get.  One editable poly started life as a plane, the other as a line with width.  They have been attached and as you can see in the first picture it says the weld will reduce the vertices count, which it does, but they don't connect.

   

Here I run the weld command with the same two vertices. 

[hagen.deloss · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

Thanks for the file! It looks like you have overlapping faces, I would suggest remaking that piece of geometry entirely, or deleting the extra faces ( you can just use the delete key).

I hope this helps!

Please select the Accept as Solution button if a post solves your issue or answers your question.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the help Hagen.  So it appears to me that even when I create a line with 0 thickness, and convert it to a editable polly, there is actually two polygons created on each segment. ..... actually 4 since is is made more like a box. 

[hagen.deloss]

@Anonymous 

The workflow I would recommend for this particular object would be to extrude the edge.

In the command panel, in your objects Edge Sub-object mode, I would select the perimeter edge, and select the extrude tool caddy, and adjust the extrusion from there.

Here is a little gif demonstrating how that would look. 

Let me know if you need any more help!