I work more and more with architectural models from Revit.  It’s common to import the FBX into Max and have 6 million polys or more.  This is mainly due to the fact that anything that has a curved surface is made up of thousands of triangles, even if its a simple, cylindrical column.  I have replaced columns at 12,000 faces with a cylinder primitive at a mere fraction of that.  And it looks better!

My main concern is stairs and railings.  Tubular railings are absolutely ridiculous in their face count.  From a distance, in wireframe view, they look almost solid.  I’ve taken to replacing them with renderable splines, or rebuilding the geometry (especially when instanced) but it can get to be time consuming and my time IS billable.

Is there any way of preventing this extreme tesselation of surfaces at export or import?

Attached is an image to help explain.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

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did anyone ever find a response to this?  I am still having the same issue in 2011.

my workaround has been to export any rounded things like , metal panels, railings, columns to dwg as acis solid and import that into max separately.  It saves a ton on geometry but i feel like there should be a better solution.  what is causing FBX to make a simple Cylinder overly complicated?

Is it possible use NURBS, patches or subdivision surfaces for your curved surfaces?  FBX supports those.