> > i never understood your technique to convert max models to 3ds in such a way that the meshes don't get all misplaced. i just want you to tell me if your technique involves having to reposition the meshes very carefully. in other words is it possible that somebody using your technique could carelessly put the mesh in a position which is better than before but still slightly off from where it should be?

> > i'd say about half the models i've seen on the Sci Fi 3d site have this mesh problem.

> It's not "changing the position" at all, you see, what I really did was to use some functions in MAX to help and kinda "collapse" my objects into pure 3D-geometry code...
> I think The "bug" is because there are many different (and strange?) settings related to object positioning that your program does not support. And you always say the documents you read about the 3DS format were inaccurate (in the least..) ....

ok thanks, that's good. that makes me happy that modelers can easily avoid the problem, but still it's a pity i can't figure out how to read those weird models properly. it affects way too many models.

ok another question. i've noticed when some models have cylinders on them, the reflection on the cylinders looks kinda slanted or skewed if you wanna call it that. i know why this happens in my program; it is because they make the cylinder using lots of rectangles divided into triangles with diagonals that all go in the same direction instead of alternating the direction in other words they do:

like this
|/|/|/|/|/|/|

or like this
|\|\|\|\|\|\|

instead of like this
|/|\|/|\|/|\|

is this something known among artists that you should remember to alternate the diagonals to avoid this normals problem on cylinders? i'm wondering if this problem happens in 3d studio max or other programs as well as my program.