I’ve not had a lot of free time this week but I’ve managed to make a bit more progress with my Max SMD importer. Mesh import seems to work fine and it now imports the materials and UV mapping too which is nice.

I did have one colossal panic when suddenly Max would start crashing when you tried to add a modifier to the mesh or when you actually exited. Lots of error messages about corrupt heap which is never good for your heart pressure. After much debugging it was down to an out of range index which wasn’t my fault. A rather vague description in the SDK docs had me putting the wrong value somewhere. Doh!

So Sunday afternoon I decided it was time to tackle the part I’d been dreading – importing the bones and animation into Max. There’s very little decent information on making bones in the Max SDK and I don’t know many people who’ve found it easy.

My first task was just to template out some code to actually just create a bone in 3DS Max. I think having my teeth pulled is less painful. To illustrate, lets imagine a conversation between MaxScript and I…

Now, lets re-enact that little scene as it went for most of Sunday afternoon between myself and the MaxSDK:

The above was then followed by two more hours of wondering why I wasn’t allowed to alter the appearance of the bone. Oh I’m sorry MaxSDK, you said when I made the bone you would make it as an Object. You didn’t tell me that you wanted to make ita SimpleObject2. See I thought a SimpleObject would be somewhat LESS than a normal Object but no, in fact it’s more. Well bugger me. You are a tease!

I think you understand my frustrations thus far.

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