Need help - Importing OBJ (or FBX) from 3DS
guru20
Posts: 72
I have some Kitbash city-building kits I bought in 3DS format. Wanted to take one of the buildings and render it as background scenery in Daz, but am having trouble exporting it from 3DS and importing into Daz:
1) I tried FBX format, and chose not to include animation, camera, or lights, but to include materials... this gave me an error message that several of the materials could not be embedded. Then, when I tried to import the FBX to see what happened, Daz stalled out and I had to force-quit.
2) I tried OBJ format, which didn't throw any error messages, but when I import into Daz, it is invisible. It is there, because I can see the outline when I hover over it, and I can click on it... but materials/textures are not showing. I tried some of the Surfaces sliders, but the only one that seems to make it show up is "Cutout Opacity", but that just seems to assign a random color to the geometries... not the actual surfaces/textures.
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Comments
2) adjusting Cutout Opacity is the fix, I think - qute a few items exported from 3DSMax have had the same issue. Given that the FBX couldn't export some materials I suspect teh model is making use of procedural shaders which have no meaning outside Max - if there are maps in the package you may be able to create your own in DS, but it depends how much was built of maps and how much was generative procedural.
OBJ is probably going to be more friendly. It's sounding as if you've inverted normals in this case. See if there are some export options in 3DS.
Texturing wise, there should be the obj itself along with an mtl file. The mtl is just a text file pointing to the original textures location among other things.
For some reason many obj imports set the cutout opacity of the material to 0 (nothing visible). To fix this just go to material and change the opacity value to 1.
Thought about inverted normals, but didn't see a way to fix that... will try to find out.
When I change that opacity, the model appears, but not with any of its actual textures/materials applied. Just some sort of bright colors for each component. What was a gritty, shiny brick-and-metal steampunk building shows up as magenta and lime green like it's from a Willy Wonka candy wrapper...
There's a Geometry Editor tool in DAZ|Studio. One of the context menu options when you have polys selected is to invert normals. I have fixed dud meshes like that, but it can be a long hard slog, especially if the mesh hasn't been properly checked for... let's just call them awkward bits.
That's what happens when D|S imports the .obj file but can't follow the link to the .mtl file. There are lots of ways this could happen, the more common include; ticking the wrong options when you export the .obj file, moving the obj/mtl file pair from one folder to another when all file references are absolute paths, etc. It can get complicated, and you'll usually end up checking your .obj and .mtl files in a text editor just to see which folders the files think they ought to be in.
DS obj import and mtl files a never ending mystery to me
it cannot even find its own exports half the time but weirdly loads my Carrara and iClone ones
sometimes having the maps in the same folder helps (the Carrara ones do that) not always
yet sometimes it will find them depending on where the original paths are
what it doesn't do that both Carrara and Poser do is ask!
DS has backface lighting on by default, and the vast majority have no idea it does or even how to turn it off, so most of you wouldn't even know if you had flipped normals or not.
Axis swapping, MAX uses the vertical Z axis of the real world, DS and Poser use the vertical Y axis of the computer world, a straight import without swapping results in a mesh laying face down/up, with the axis swapped you have a good chance of having a mesh that is inside out and mirrored.
Not a fan of the new surface settings for imported items, the items can be trying enough for most without having to figure out the Iray base shader, an option to turn it on or off would have been the smart move.
To make life a little easier open the MTL in a text editor, it's plain ascii, what you are looking for under each material in "d 1" or "d 1.0", that will make the surface fully visible next time you import it, some exporters don't use "d", instead they use "Tr 0.0", either change that to "Tr 1.0" or to "d 1.0".
"File > Import", this will load the OBJ and any MTL next to it with the same name, problem is that the texture pathways in the MTL need to be the full pathways including drive letter.
Much better to make a content directory or two for OBJ/DAE/FBX, and add them to the "Other Import Formats" in the Content Library Tab. That way DS will look for the textures from the MTL's location, so if the MTL has a pathway "maps/texture.xxx", then as long as you have a maps folder next to the MTL and the textures are in there, then DS will find and load them.
The OBJ and MTL files are text files. You can open them in any text editor, like notepad. I'd put good money that either the OBJ or MTL has an absolute path to either the MTL or to the actual texture file (a jpg or png file). the simplest solution is to change those paths to relative paths. If all the files are in the same folder just removing the entire path will do the trick.