On a few OBJ files I import and even FBX files, they appear fine but as soon as I hit shade or select texture the mesh disappears from the screen.

Not sure what I am doing wrong or is there something wrong in exporting them?

Could be the anti-aliasing settings for your display driver:
“Anti-Aliasing should be set to application controlled” (Stephen Blair)

The “other” Softimage community: si-community.com

It is set for application control. In fact I am using the Nvidia defaults.

Meshes disappear in shaded mode if you have not assigned them to a shadingGroup. By default, all new meshes are connected to the initialShadingGroup (they use the material lambert1) but this sometimes fails. Select the mesh [Rendering] Lighting/Shading->Assign Existing Material > lambert1

You may be correct.

This is a converted file which already has material assigned, I was about to post that the meshes have a hardware material assigned already. Deleting that and the mesh show up. Of course I have to create new materials.

I will look at what you have mentioned and see if perhaps there is a way to change those materials to work rather than deleting.

In the explorer they are listed under each mesh as hardware and then Phong (for Surface, Shadow and Photon).

Maybe there is something wrong with the imported geometry.
http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Cleaning_up_Imported_Meshes

This is a import issue with XSI 7.5 and Modtool 7.5. Importing a collada file from 3DS max into V7.5 gives this result, plus exporting out to Collada from V7.5 generates a bad file for my game engine.

However, bringing this same model into other apps or XSI Modtool V6 works fine.

So definitely and issue with 7.5.

Edit: I should say the same import/export from 3DS Max into XSI 6 works, not the exports from XSI 7.5. Also this was tested on two machines with the same results..

How does one resolve these type issues when using a demo version? Would love to get feedback from Autodesk before I kick the bucket and start looking for other alternatives.

Hi,
I’ve had the same problem with some imported objects. Usually when they disapper it’s because the materials all have their Transparency set to 0. So, double click your shader on the material, go to Transparency/Reflection and untick the checbox after Transparency: Enable. This is on every material, so in case you got plenty of them use a script where you change every materials transparency off, something like this: SetValue("Sources.Materials.DefaultLib.*.Phong.refract_inuse", false, null)

Hope it helps