Spring RTS Engine

According to Google's Sketchup site:

A 3DS mesh does not store any normal data so normals must be computed by the target system. Some importers might compute the normals incorrectly resulting in the appearance of flipped textures.

This probably explains a lot of the problems people are reporting with smoothing groups...

A good fix, btw, is to use something like UVMapper Pro, which is what I use to do uvmapping with, to fix the models. You can use this tool to weld all the verts of your model, then use the Split By Angle feature to split out sharp-edged corners. I've been using this myself, and it works great!

And no, I'm not related to, paid by, etc., the guy who makes UVMapper I've been using it for the last two years, though, and it's an awesome piece of software for working through mesh problems and getting a model mapped out for skinning.

I use Blender. Period.

In soviet russia blender uses you!

I use the wings internal one in combination with UVM classic.

With the new blender beta, I'm never going back to anything. Ambient Occlusion Baking is the best thing in the world.

I used xNormal for AO baking so far. That or a script to convert the result of a Radiosity simulation (superior to AO by a wide margin) over to a UVed model and draw it to texture.

Meh, if y'all are that happy with it, maybe I should look at Blender and see if I can get past my hatred of its interface long enough to get to know it

Same here, though I got slightly frustrated after I was half through the noob to pro tutorial.

Tried it, and it crashed on opening

I will give it another go next version

You can render on the texture with max too, just put a skylight with shadow on the model, and render to texture to get ao on texture

btw what is xnormal and radiosity simulation??