While writing a script for exporting to custom format I noticed that in max, texture vertices are separated from position vertices, and I can't seem to connect the dots. So you have vertices, face index that iterates through vertices, and then texture vertices with their own story? I thought that as a joke and then read this in the maxscript help:
The mesh class contains a list of texture vertices which are completely independent of the regular vertices in the mesh. There is no correlation between the number of vertices in a mesh and the number of texture vertices. In addition to the texture vertices there are also texture faces. There needs to be one texture face for every regular face in the mesh.
whaat..?
Different number of vertices, same number of faces... my gears just broke.
Under editable mesh and trimesh there is a topic "Understanding texture coordinates.." and a section on "finding the corresponding vertices" which goes like this:
In order to find out which texture vertex corresponds to a mesh vertex, you have to do the following:
Note the number of the vertex (1st , 2nd or 3rd - .x, .y or .z) inside each face.
For each face referencing the vertex, get the texture face with the same index.
Get the index of the respective texture vertex from the face - 1st , 2nd or 3rd / .x, .y or .z
The vertex you got corresonds to the mesh vertex we started with.
... I don't understand a single step in here. It's just throwing words "find index of vertex, reference, face.." You never know if it means position vertex index or texture vertex. You either have to be a mind reader, or the guy that wrote this. And thanks for not a single illustration.
If I just go through the steps:
1. Take the index of the mesh vertex.
- What index? One specific? All of them? What mesh vertex? Position or texture?
2. Find out which faces reference the index of the face.
- What is "the face"? What did I miss between step 1 and 2??
No. I give up. If someone can shed some light on this or suggest a more suitable software for this task (per vertex position, normals and texture coords export and a decent documentation/help) I'd be so happy. I didn't buy max, so I'm not tied to this. I pray there is a better alternative.
I thought that max was THE choice for game dev modeling, but all these weird design choices. Like, who uses Z as up vector.