The physical mesh

The physical mesh is a wrapper mesh that marks the interaction zone of an object in a MaxWehere space. You could imagine it as the hit zone of an object. For example, if you look at the armchair in the following image, you could see the purple mesh that will appear in MaxWhere and the gray see-through wrapper object around it that is the physical mesh.

Exporting physical meshes

The physical mesh will be exported if the Generate physical meshes option is checked in the export options dialog. By default, this option is checked. Barring certain cases, the physical mesh is simplified by the 3ds Max 2 MaxWhere Exporter during the general export process.

By default, the exporter will attempt to convert the mesh to a physical mesh with a polygon count set in the export options by the Polycount goal field. The exporter will attempt to reach this value with three different parameter settings. If during this three attempt does not result in a successful conversion, the exporter uses the Fallback quality settings to create the physical mesh. The exporter also uses these quality settings for calculating the output physical mesh if the Auto-params option is unchecked. This is needed by advanced users, if they want to export manually created custom physical mesh shapes.

The following image demonstrates the generated physical objects from quality settings 0 to 5. The 0 quality setting will produce an exact copy of the in-blender mesh. The recommended value of this setting is 3, which is the default value.