How can i export a High poly 3D Max model to SU?
3DS. file format has a limit to polys… and so is the dwg. format.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
WOW that is one crazy complex tree. Even if you could get it into sketch up it will kill performance.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
I think that too, sketchup wont handle it, i mean, with the house, and other things! But if you wanto to export, select the leaves, than go to the element selection, select some groups of leaves, and detatch it, and keep going, thats the way i do that.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
honestly i wont suggest it.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
I thought to put SU to test. and see how he handles such a complex geometry model.
Oh well… :-\
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
*OBJ - universal 
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Only for background info this quote from an old email conversation that I did with Michael from MoI3D.com. He wrote:
Hi Micha, do you have to use .3ds format for this export?
Some limitations of that format seem to be causing difficulties.
1 - 3DS is a very old format and uses 16-bit numbers for the mesh data.
This means that a single mesh in a 3DS file can only have up to 65535
vertices or polygons in it. Your object contains more polygons than that, so
it gets broken up pretty arbitrarily into different pieces so that each
piece fits within the 65535 limit.2 - 3DS can only contain triangle polygons in it, not polygons with more
sides. If you can export to OBJ format, it can handle polygons with more
than 3 sides which will simplify the output.#3 - 3DS is not able to have vertex normals defined in the file for shading
information, programs that read 3ds files have to manually calculate
smoothing information just by averaging the normals for adjacent polygons
which tends to cause shading glitches. If you can export to OBJ instead,
vertex normals will be stored in the OBJ file which come from the original
NURBS surface data.Especially #3 is a pretty big issue - the reason why a display mesh in MoI
looks as good as it does is because MoI uses the good vertex normals for
doing shading. If you were to take the display mesh and then try to render
it without the good normals you would see several problems.One other additional problem with 3DS is that it only has up to 32
“smoothing groups” in the file. It looks like one of the main glitches in
your file is that some of the smoothing groups are being re-used, creating
some extra smoothing between some of the inside holes and the outer surface
that you don’t want.You should be able to get rid of extra smoothing by turning welding off
(expand the Meshing options dialog by clicking on the arrow in the
lower-left corner, and uncheck “Weld vertices along edges”) - this will
export separated vertices for each surface which will prevent unwanted
smoothing.So if you must use .3ds, turn off welding and I think your problem will be
solved.The actual mesh polygon structure itself seems to be working fine for this
object, it looks like the re-use of smoothing groups after it loops around
the 32 group limit is causing the shading glitches. It may be possible for
me to fix this up a bit to try and assign the same smoothing group to
different pieces that don’t touch one another.I did a quick testing using OBJ export instead and it seems to generate a
good result.I hope this helps!
- Michael
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
This is why I’m so annoyed that SU only supports DWG or 3DS for import. None of them are much good! FBX please!
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
thats a new one. i did not now about this .3ds vs .obj b4… thanks to that.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
SU doesn’t support obj. files
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
…Rightfully
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Think there is a plugin importer… But I’ve had mixed luck with it…
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
There should be a plugin for OBJ because I used it back in the day. Also you could always do what someone else said by exporting it in peices.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
There’s a free obj importer ruby script for SU halfway down this page, but I’ve had problems getting it to work properly:
http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/em\_fil\_page.htm
SU should handle one or two of those trees reasonably well- I’ve tested with half a million faces in a model and it’s still easily navigable in full textured shaded mode on my 3 yr old Centrino Duo 1.83GHz, 1.5Gb RAM, nVIdia GeForce Go7400 laptop. Not much fun if you have to do much more modelling after importing that tree, but just use a proxy component instead and then reload the tree component right before rendering.
Also, many people seem to forget/ignore that SU counts a rectangle as one face, whereas 3ds counts it as two triangles. Moreover, SU will count a pentagon, octagon or myriagon(!) as one face, whereas 3D Studio Max will calculate it as connected triangles. A 24-sided circle is a single face in SU, but a 22 face mesh in 3ds. So when I hear complaints about a few hundred thousand polys bringing SU to its knees you have to at least double that number to get close to the true figure for comparison. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that we should all push Google to make SU more efficient- I think we can safely say a 1 billion face Maya model would make SU cry like a little girl being attacked by Chuck Norris… and Bruce Lee. 
Like everyone says, just export the mesh from 3D Studio Max in bits, with a single orthogonal line at the 0,0,0 point to make sure they all import in the right position. SU can take AGES to import large 3ds and dwg files (I had to leave it overnight last week to import an 18Gb dwg 3d file), but if you leave it alone it will do it eventually, even if it looks like your computer has died.
If you’re really struggling, the free open-source prog Meshlab does a great job of poly-crunching (use the Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation filter), smoothing and importing and exporting most 3D formats- it can probably convert each of those tree leaves to a single triangle for example, effectively halving the file size.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Did anybody consider splitting up the mesh into several pieces so that it could be exported by 3ds??? I’ve done that many a time (back in the old days of exporting Rhino to Max…oooh gives me shivers down my spine)
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Question: “Did anybody consider splitting up the mesh into several pieces so that it could be exported by 3ds???”
Answer:
heh heh, sorry Damien!
p.s. what the heck is up with the forum lately? Yesterday it was almost impossible to modify a long post as the text scroll window would instantly scroll up to the top as soon as a key was released and today it won’t let me insert quotes! I had to add and edit the ones above manually. 
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Okay…I just woke up…wow, I really missed each of those…I guess I need some coffee or something.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
http://www.scriptspot.com/sketchup/script/obj-importer
to import obj’s and mesh into sketchup
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
Thanks all for the info.
I tried the obj import plugin, it works. But it’s veeeery slow, and doesn’t import materials/textures.
Bottom line it’s a black hole in SU’s abilities.
Re: High poly 3D Max Object export
I wonder why you would want to go from Max to Sketchup.
High poly objects are simply a nightmare for Sketchup.