Hi Fred,
An updated version of the .dle, including versions for Max 6 and Max 7 is part of the newest “experimental” release of Panda. The brand new .dlo exporter is in internal testing.
However, neither of these plugins have changed the way textures are handled. If I understand your question, textures are exported with the mesh. You should not need to do any rendering to get a texture.
In order to help you, I need you to answer some questions.
Open the exported egg file. It is just text can can be viewed in notepad (or wordpad if it’s a large egg).
Does the tag “” appear somewhere near the top of the file?
If it does, is your texture file actually in the directory listed on the next line?
What format is your texture? (jpg, tiff, bmp …)
Is your texture square and one of the following sizes: 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024?
When you pview, watch the output in the dos window. What errors, that look like the one I listed in my previous post, are output?
I suspect that your problem is actually pretty simple. If you can answer those questions I bet we can narrow it down.