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554 Chapter 20: Managing Scenes and Projects
Inter face
Merge / R eplace Options group
Merge With Cur rent Scene—Incoming geometry
is merged with any existing geometry that is
already present in the scene. This setting is useful
if you have several separate files that contains
componen ts that you want to combine into a single
model.
Completely R eplace Curr ent S cene—The file you’re
importing will completely replace any existing
geometry that is in the current scene. If your
current scene has not b een saved, you are given
the opportunity to save your changes to the
current scene befor e the import process continues.
Default=on.
Material Options group
Import I nventor Materials—When turned on, all
Inventor materials and texture maps are translated
andimportedintothescene. Ifturnedoff,no
materials are imported with the mo del.
Assign Materia l IDs—Lets you control w hether
material IDs are assigned to objects that are
imported from Inventor. You can assign different
materials to different surfaces of the same object
while working in Inventor. When these objects are
imported to 3ds Max, m aterial IDs are assigned
to t h e faces of single objects to which multiple
materials are applied.
Forexample,you’vecreatedasingleobjectthat
represents a knob that has a threaded shaft and
you’ve applied a black, plastic material to the
knob and a silver, metal material to the threaded
shaft. IfAssignMaterialIDsisturnedonwhen
you import the model into 3ds Max, the faces
oftheobjectthathavetheplasticmaterialare
assigned material ID #1 and the faces that have the
metalmaterialareassignedmaterialID#2.Ifyou
choose to try different materials while working
in 3ds Max, you can quickly make sub-object
selections (page 1–74) based on the material IDs or
apply a Multi/Sub -O bject material (page 2–1594)
that contains materials that correspond to the IDs
assigned to the faces.
Mesh Resolution group
Mesh Resolution—This slider lets you determine
the deg ree of refinement applied to mesh objects
by the importation process. When set to 0 (zero),
the geometry is imported as it appears in Autodesk
Inventor. When set less than zero, the mesh is
optimized with fewer faces thus reducing detail.
If the mesh resolution is set higher than zero, the
mesh is tessellated with more faces, giving you
greater detail.
The mesh resolution slider is always set to 0 when
you initiate an import.