[waylon]

Hi. Does anyone know of a way to weld vertices in 3ds Max 4.x that doesn't screw up the UVW mapping coordinates? Thanks.

[Vgta]

Weld before you map, other wise your co-ordinates well all messed up. Then apply a cylindrical UVW to the mesh, make sure that where that the meeting point on your gizmo is at the back of the head (well I am guessing you are making a head).
Then use texturizer or Unwrap to create a flat template of your mesh to make your textures.
They are both really good plug-ins and they are free.


You can find the plug-ins here

[ June 18, 2001: Message edited by: Vgta ]

[waylon]

Yeah, I'm already pretty decent at setting up mapping coordinates... The problem is, for the project I'm working on, we need a high-detail and a low-detail version of the same object. No matter what I do, I end up having to UVW-map the whole object twice (once for each version.) If I could find a plugin that would let me weld vertices without screwing up the coordinates, I could just model the full-detail version, then weld vertices until it meets the requirements of the low-detail version. But.. alas... I see nothing but tedious re-mapping in store for me.

[Jock McxSporran]

You are doing it the wrong way around IMO. It's much easier to add detail to a model than to optimise one to get the polycount down, but there's no way of preserving the UVW coordinates either way. Meshsmooth should respect them, but it's not always 100% reliable either.

[Frost]

Use Multiresolution Mesh from Intel (urgh, machine optimization!), or weld the verts, then unwrap the UVs and weld the UV verts as well, olah! (I like doing that stuff too=)

PS: multires comes with Max4 in the modifiers list.

[ June 18, 2001: Message edited by: Frost ]

[waylon]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Frost: Cool, I didn't realize they had added that multirez tool. I'll have to play with that.

And... well, I found a pretty good solution to my original problem. I got one of my co-workers to write me a maxscript which can weld vertices without screwing up the mapping. Except it doesn't work when the vertices are on a texture boundary. But hey, it's better than nothing.