Hi,
I just wanted to let you all know that the current Panda team at CMU is working on improving the max exporters. In particular, we have solved two known bugs with it (polygon normal issues and exporting physiques) and are making an entirely new interface (using a .dlo helper object instead of the export menu).
The current version of the .dle I’m working on seems to work fine for Max 5,6, and 7, however, we have only used simple test cases to export and have not verified it on anything more “real-world.” So if you want feel free to send me models and the textures that go with them (the .max files and the output .eggs: a zip file that maintains your folder structure would be ideal) and I’ll take a look and see if the problem is with the exporter.
As for the models showing up white: When you make an egg, it puts the locations of the textures into the egg. For instance, if you save your egg into a folder named models, and you have a texture named “face.jpg” in a folder called textures, the egg will look for the texture in “…\textures\face.jpg”. If you move the egg to pview it and do not keep the textures in the same realtive path, then Panda won’t find them and they won’t show up. The way you can tell this is happening if if pview outputs lines like this in the dos window.
:gobj: Loading texture ../textures/face.jpg
:gobj(error): Texture::read() - couldn't read: ../textures/face.jpgTo fix it either make sure the texture is where it should be relative to the egg, or edit the egg file to point it to the right place.
There are some other reasons why textures wouldn’t display, and they all print errors in pview, so if you copy them here I may be able to help.