Exporting X-reffed skinned/morphed objects in Max?

[Rick Stirling]

Just a quick theoretical thing - has anyone ever exported xref objects from Max that had a skin or morph target on them? For example you'd have a body file that you export from and the head would be referenced from another max file.

I imagine that skinned objects shouldn't be too hard, but morphs might be more problematic.

At this stage I've done ZERO experiments and don't have Max at home to experiment with. I just wondered if anyone had already tried this.

[aesir]

impossible unfortunately. I researched it a bit when I tried to set it up with xrefs for my characters into all my scenes. Sadly, max sucks in this.

[Mark Dygert]

Theres not much you can do with an Xref, other then drop it in your scene and move it around. 3dsmax is horrible at referencing other files. If theres animation in the original files I THINK* it will play but to edit it you're stuck having to go back to the original file. But be careful it often loses its link when you go back to the main scene file, displaying a tiny little x.

I heard a rumor that they fixed a bunch of things in 2008, but after playing around with it for a few min I was able to recreate all the bugs that caused me to stop using them in the first place.

Total garbage. Its one thing that Maya does really well...

[Rick Stirling]

Thanks guys - it seems that everyone is saying the same thing. I will of course try to export an xreffed skinned object to the game myself just to make sure, but it seems this is a dead end.

Ah well, back to the drawing board.

[Eric Chadwick]

We created out own Xref system because of all this. Not live referencing though, only after export, in the game.

[Rick Stirling]

Cheers again- it seems like a dead end and I can't think of enough situations where it'd be used that would warrant anything custom being written.