Accessory Addon breaks Dressing Room

[ed]

Following the video tutorial on creating accessories, I've made a hat and a watch.

The hat seems to be OK: it appears in the hat section and doesn't seem to cause any problems.

However, the watch breaks the dressing room. The dressing room background image disappears, as do most of the hairstyles and hats when applied to the puppet. Sometimes the puppet's head will also disappear (apart from the eyes).

I've exported the materials and the mesh from 3DS Max several times, making sure that the mesh alone is selected, and is properly skinned to the forearm bone. However, each attempt creates the same dressing room problem. If anyone has any ideas about what's going wrong, and how I might fix it, I'd be grateful for any pointers.


(PS: The only other thing I can think to try is to delete the Distribute_Male puppet from 3DS Max before exporting the watch mesh (I've been using the puppet to adjust the size and position of the watch--despite the intersection between watch and arm!))


EDIT: Dodgy addon removed from post

[Ben_S]

There is something odd about the mesh for the watch which is causing errors with the other parts of the costume that the character wears. It's baffling us, at the moment, I'm afraid.

It might well be a good idea to delete everything that isnt the thing you are exporting.

[ed]

Thanks for checking (glad to have baffled you all too!)

I'll go back to Max and try again ...

[Ben_S]

An extra note - one of your materials had a normal map that was using a psd file rather than a dds. This wasnt the thing causing the problem, but is worth fixing if you ever get everything else working.

[ed]

An extra note - one of your materials had a normal map that was using a psd file rather than a dds. This wasnt the thing causing the problem, but is worth fixing if you ever get everything else working.

I spotted that too! I must've dragged the wrong file onto the material editor, but I've swapped it for a dds now. Thanks for checking :-)

[ed]

I tried again, but found that if I deleted the puppet from Max, I would lose the bone in the skin modifier so I selected the mesh for the watch and the forearm bone and then isolated the selection to export the cal bits. The new addon has the same effect on the dressing room.

When I can face the process again, I'll try without the skeleton: the worse that can happen is the Cal exporter will crash 3DS Max.

If or when that fails, I'll try something else. From scratch.

[ed]

It doesn't seem to be possible to export a cal mesh from Max without a skeleton/bone present.

I made a new accessory from scratch and it works without breaking the dressing room.