What is Texporter?

Texporter is a utility plug-in for 3D Studio MAX. Its main purpose is simple mesh painting. If your mesh painting needs are not heavy, then this utility will serve you well in your works. It simply unfolds the mesh according to its mapping coordinates and lets you paint whatever you want using your favorite painting program (Photoshop, Fractal Painter, etc.) You can also use this template image to warp an existing image (your photo maybe) so that it fits perfectly to the mesh when you map it onto the mesh.

It’s advantage over the 3D mesh painters is you can use your favorite painting program which will have much more painting tools. Interactivity on the other hand is the minus part. :o)

How does it work?

It converts mapping coordinates of a mesh object to a bitmap. This may be considered as the reverse of “Mapping” process, where you fold a UV plane on a mesh using various techniques (planer, spherical, etc.) What Texporter generates is a bitmap on which you can see topology of the mesh in UV space (not 3d space). This can be thought as the unfolded mesh. This “unfolded” map then can be used as a template to paint texture (or bump, opacity, etc.) maps on your favorite painting program.

Version History

What is New in version 3.2?

This version works only with MAX 3.x

Now you can see the faces as filled in the unfolded image.

Option to see filled faces, edges or both of them.

Option to unfold only selected faces.

Option to unfold only faces with a given material ID.

Option to mark overlapping areas (i.e. points with the same UV coordinate)

Colorization by Face Area (or face density). This may help you to determine where to put more details.

Colorization by vertex colors.

Fixed "colorize by normals" option. Now we do correct normal colors.

What was New in version 2.0 For MAX3?

New (99) mapping channels are supported.

What was new in version 2.0?

Except for the re-compilation, there are some new and changed features

Since MAX 2.0 has two mapping channels, Texporter 2.0 supports both of them.

New backface-cull option: this option is used to reject the backing faces so that more clear image is generated.

Show last image button is added

The known bug which crashes the system in the “Colorize by face normals” mode is now fixed.

Installation

Install

Installation is done by simply uncompressing the zip file and copying the files to appropriate directories. The zip file holds directory information so if you specify the home directory of your MAX (for example C:\3DSMax\) as the destination directory, all files will be copied to their correct places. (Do not forget to turn on “extract directory structure” option of your unzipper)

Texporter will be ready to use the next time you run your MAX.

Using Texporter

Click here to get step-by-step instructions to learn how to use Texporter.

Click here for explanations of parameters