Why is it broken?, A guide to using 3DSMAX for Dawn of War Thread - Renegade Modificatus

This article will eventually contain accumulative information about the various reasons 3DS MAX may have had trouble exporting something for Dawn of War

(hopefully we will also eventually get to the bottom of why of all the members of the DOW modding community only I seem to be able to export outside of C:\program files\thq\dawn of war(or dark crusade) as it stands any attempts to replicate it have for others are still inconclusive, but it seems that simply by naming any folder "dawn of war gold" and pasting the dawn of war exe, the pipeline.ini and the mod tools folder inside I can export to that location, after NickTheSad was unable to replicate the result I now believe it may relate to the fact the Virtual Machine I use sees my actual PC as a networked drive, which begs the question, if 3ds max 8 thinks it's exporting to a networked folder will this behaviour occur for others in likewise conditions ???)

1. Max suddenly started to crash each time I export the model, (I recently attached a mesh with a different texture) ? A. 3DSMax may have generated a "stupid" material, try picking the material from the recently combined mesh into an empty material editor slot, it will likely be a bizarre mess of empty materials and other textures from the model, deleting this material and modifying an existing one to contain the necessary textures can sometimes fix this kind of issue, NOTE you will likely have to then adjust the mesh material parameters (see surface properties tab in the mesh editor, click select by material to choose everything with a specific texture and then choose the desired material to assign (you can use the arrows to scroll through what's available))

[FootNote: exporting a seperate "dud" copy of the model with the desired textures on separate meshes and no animations, then reimporting it, and merging with the real version, selecting a mesh and merging it into your working copy and choosing the option "used merged materials" will bring in the unified texture material from the export, if your model had too many textures to begin with, this may prove helpful as a crude way to save time and effort)]

2. I forgot to save and 3DSMax crashed ?, A. if you're lucky the 3ds max folder may have a copy of your model in it's AUTOBAK folder (it probably won't be in exactly the state you lost it in, but it may save you some time which would have been spent redoing even more work)

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3. The model won't export when smoothing was applied ? A. sometimes this means there are random vertex's floating around on the mesh or that some random triangles aren't properly attached to anything, selecting a mesh, clicking select element, then manually selecting each element and clicking the hide button (note this is the one located in the edit mesh dialogue and NOT the one from the right click menu) once everything large is hidden you should see some small triangles not attached to anything, deleting these will often help (but always make a backup of your file before doing so incase they weren't just duplicated faces and are better fixed another way) (also check if any spare vertexes appear even though the mesh is hidden, select all and delete, then go to the element tab and unhide your mesh, exporting now the problem should have disappeared), NOTE if a flat two sided surface (like a flag, a cape or a loincloth) found on many ingame models has smoothing it can also prevent exporting, if "select by face" with "ignore back facing" ticked you can get one side of the flat surface, rotate the camera until you're directly in-front of it and select the desired flat object, right-click and on the menu select detach, make sure "as element" is ticked but insure that "as clone" is NOT ticked, exporting now should work.

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