The Harvest Moon Consortium

We have come across a problem with the Dwarven Halls tileset: the same mesh node names have been used in many tiles. For example, many tiles have a node simply called "wall". "window_frame" turns up in 22 tiles and "window_frame_01" another 22 times. And so on.

This causes a problem with mass tile load in GMax because parent links get confused and bits of mesh get parented to the wrong tiles.

I could write a macro to rename all mesh nodes uniquely (for example, to append the model name to the node name giving wall_a01_01, wall_a01_02 and so on) but perhaps some tool for doing this already exists?

How do tileset makers do this?

Err... I don't think this is a problem actually... I regularly have multiple meshes with the same name in my max file and they export fine.

There IS a glitch when you select and link that you may not have noticed.

For some reason, sometimes when you draw a box to select meshes, sometimes you'll see other meshes get selected instead of what you've boxed. Usually I just reflexively draw a box around the meshes, then immediately draw it again and everything is selected properly.

Thats assuming that you have multiple tiles in the same max file and you select stuff to export, that is. Otherwise, it could be something else causing the error... usually the mesh name is pretty irrelevant.

OMB, have you tried the nwmax rename tools?

make a selection including all the 'walls' in the scene and then go to tools->rename object. There are quite a few options there.

Hmmm... Gmax might not let you do multiple select very easily though.

If you have all the tiles imported you can use the 3ds rename tools... I think you should be able to just hit "h" and select everything thats the same name.

Anyway, I'm 99.5% sure that it shouldn't make any difference.