Autodesk is a 3D modeling tool used by game developers, TV commercial studios and architects to model and render 3D concepts and assets. For this guide, we use a default scene of an interior to showcase how to export and use this scene in LuciadFusion. On the left you see the Scene Explorer, which indicates all objects available in the scene. In this guide, we export those objects together with their name, and create an OGC 3D Tiles dataset.

Some objects are complex, and contain child objects. In the Figure 1, “Autodesk 3D Max example scene”, you see the parent object Furniture, which has several child objects, such as FurnitureDoor and FurnitureDoor2.

A default scene in Autodesk 3D Max
Figure 1. Autodesk 3D Max example scene

The first step is to export your scene as an OBJ file:

A tool bar showing the export button
Figure 2. How to export your 3D scene
A panel showing which file format to pick
Figure 3. Choose OBJ as export format

To pick the right export settings, have a look at this figure.

A panel showing which export options to pick
Figure 4. Recommended export settings. De-select Flip YZ-Axis, and select Smoothing groups.

The important settings are:

  • Flip YZ-Axis: make sure to de-select this option. If you leave it selected, your data appears sideways in LuciadFusion.

  • Smoothing groups: select this option to ensure that smoothing groups are exported to OBJ.

This figure shows the comparison between Scene Explorer and the output OBJ file. As you can see, leaf object names are encoded as group IDs in the output OBJ. This means that we also keep these names in the output OGC 3D Tiles dataset when we process them with LuciadFusion.

A panel comparing the resulting OBJ to the Scene Dialogue
Figure 5. How Autodesk 3D Max maps object names to identifiers. Note that only leaf child names are preserved. Parent names aren’t taken into account.

If we take the exported OBJ and plug it into LuciadFusion, we can create an OGC 3D Tiles service. When we preview this in LuciadRIA, we can perform selection operations, as shown in Figure 6, “The resulting dataset in LuciadRIA, with selection and metadata enabled.”:

A panel showing the result in LuciadRIA
Figure 6. The resulting dataset in LuciadRIA, with selection and metadata enabled.

Making parent objects selectable as a whole

While you are exporting to OBJ, you may notice that only leaf nodes are selectable. In our example scene, we can select FurnitureDoorHandle4, but not the parent object Furniture.

To make sure that complex objects are treated as a single selectable objects, rename all child objects to have the same unique name. In this figure, we rename all components of Furniture, so that they also use the name Furniture.

As a result, 3D Max groups all leaf nodes together as a single object.

The scene dialog showing all children renamed
Figure 7. To enable selection of the entire object at once by default, rename all child objects to the same unique name.

When we export this again, and click the cupboard, we see that we now select the entire cupboard named Furniture. We can also see that the metadata in the OGC 3D Tiles is Furniture, as we expected from our 3D max scene.

LuciadRIA showing the selection of a single cabinet
Figure 8. After renaming all children to the same name, we can select the entire cabinet as a single object.

When it’s exporting to OBJ, 3D Max groups together all objects with the same name, even if they belong to different parents. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you give all objects that need to be selectable by themselves unique names within the 3D Max scene.