Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Revit to 3ds Max through FBX

Recently I looked into the FBX linking tool which has just been introduced in 3ds Max 2011. I ran into problems immediately when I went to link a file which had artificial lights.

It appeared that in the 64 bit version of 3ds Max Design that there was a single toggle that was off in the shipping version to import artificial lights. Simple fix just turn it on. That led to other questions. Suppose you are working on a Revit file and import your artificial lights. You will probably need to refine your lights in 3ds Max to do such things like add soft shadows. If you then make a change in Revit and reimport the scene with lights you lose your changes that you made in 3ds Max.

This can be quite anoying if all you wanted to do is move a floor lamp from one location to another. Would be great if you could retain the information you changed in 3ds Max and only import the changed location of the lamp.