I’ve been struggling to find a good, reliable way of extracting normals from a mesh that were explicitly specified using the Edit Normals modifier.

The problem is that these normals do not appear to pass through to the Mesh that is created as a result of converting a node’s Object to a TriObj. I’ve tried getting the normals using the IEditNormalsMod interface (after searching for the appropriate modifier) and while this works sometimes, there are a few shortcomings:
1)The mesh’s node needs to be selected.
2)The ‘modify’ panel needs to be visible.
3)If I force steps 1 and 2 using GetCOREInterface()->SelectNode() and GetCOREInterface()->SetCommandPanelTaskMode(), Max sometimes crashes.
4)This approach is ugly.

This doesn’t seem like such a difficult problem to solve but I’ve spent an enormous time looking for a solution. Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. - Using IGame is not an option.

Did you figure out a solution for this? If not, I can ask one of the coders here how we did it for our exporter.

Try this… currently only spits our the “true” explicit test...but I’m sure you can mod it
you can do a quick test using $geometry as the objs_array argument.

Hope it helps.

fn exp_norms objs_array =
(
max modify mode
for each in objs_array do
(
if(validmodifier each each.modifiers[#edit_normals]) then
(
each
select each
normnum = (each.modifiers[1].editnormalsmod.getnumnormals node:each)
format “%\n” each.name
for i = 1 to normnum do
(
format “Normal#:% Value:%\n” i (each.modifiers[1].editnormalsmod.getnormalexplicit i node:each)
)
)
)
)