Greetings and salutations on these wonderful forums.

I'm working on a project that requires cutting an existing mesh into smaller cubes and then exporting the newly created cut objects into separate files. I'm using 3DS Max 2012.

Currently, I'm creating a custom "3d grid" made of arrayed planes, then applying the ProCutter compound object and the result is satisfactory so far. Say I created a solid cube and then cut it in this manner into 10x10x10 smaller cubes. Every new cube acquires the name of the cutting planes plus an incremental number.

However, if the original cube mesh has a texture (I UVW Unwrapped it) then the newly created polys would have that exact same texture wrapped around them.

How can I get a result where the newly cut polygons have a different texture, or at least different exact UVW coordinates of the same texture?
I hope I am clear enough on my problem, but the result I'm looking for is something like automatically getting a muscle and bone texture on newly created polys after you cut a character's arm off, or the insides of the fruit cut in Fruit Ninja.

I assume there is a manual way of assigning a new texture to all newly created polys but this method becomes ludicrous when there are hundreds of smaller cubes that would need this manual texture assigning.

As for exporting all of the new cubes into a separate file, I understand there might be scripts that do this, but I have yet to find and test how these work.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Let me try to break this down, because it seems you have explained "too much" and it may just appear more complicated than it is.


It sounds like you simply need a way to assign n unique materials to n unique objects in a selection. Is this correct?

Originally Posted by perna

Let me try to break this down, because it seems you have explained "too much" and it may just appear more complicated than it is.


It sounds like you simply need a way to assign n unique materials to n unique objects in a selection. Is this correct?

Well, I would need to assign one new unique material to a number of polygons (not whole objects) that belong to a number of individual objects. Here's an image of the steps I'm taking and the desired result.




The first image is a complete cube and two planes that will be in use with ProCutter. The goal is to divide this cube into several smaller cube objects.

The second image shows the result (moved the positions a bit for easier viewing) - four new cubes that retain the UVW Unwrap mapping of the original but the new polys also retain that same texture, which I assume is perfectly normal as this is the only texture assigned to this object.

The third image shows the desired end result where the newly created polys automatically have a different texture. I did this manually in the example but it would be incredibly tedious to do it if I were to cut the original cube into a 3D grid of 20x20x20 smaller cubes.

ichty: That's actually the default behaviour. All you need to do is assign a material to your cutter object. This is the material that will be used for new polygons.

Originally Posted by perna

ichty: That's actually the default behaviour. All you need to do is assign a material to your cutter object. This is the material that will be used for new polygons.

@perna, thank you for your reply. Actually, you seem to be correct in the case when "Explode by Elements" is not selected. This cuts the cube into smaller cubes and applies the cutter material to the new polygons. However, this also leaves all of the new cubes as one attached mesh and the only way I can think of to detach all of the new cubes into separate meshes is to painstakingly select the required of polygons of every separate cube and detach them manually.

Now, when the "Explode by Elements" is selected, the cube is cut into individual smaller cube objects but it always applies the cutter material to the whole surface of every smaller cube. In other words, looking at the picture I posted above, the result is having the new smaller cubes completely covered with the green texture.

I can't seem to get the complete result any way I try. Any ideas?

EDIT:
Well, selecting all elements within the Editable Mesh and exploding them with a value of 180 seems to get the desired result of getting separate objects for every new cube, so I guess that's settled.
Thanks for your replies.