Normally I grab one set of those shared edges and do a stitch to attach to the other. A trimmed surface from CAD usually results in that section being split in two, each taking up half the area, which also results in two rectangular UV islands. In a Editable Poly, you’d have it unwrapped as one rectangular UV island in its simplest form (which does result in some stretching, yes). Picture a cylinder that was bent a few degrees, and how one would unwrap the mid section (ignore the ends).

Just a UI element that I was able to toggle. Of course this doesn’t mean it does anything I suppose. In Hard Surface Mode, I was able to turn on keep-seams. Same thing would happen if you used the vanilla 3ds Max CAD importing as mesh and tossed on a Turbosmooth. But not subdivision modifiers like Turbosmooth since it is converted CAD and is just a bunch of tris, many long and skinny. In the end, it is an Editable Mesh, and works for the most part with any modifier that works with Editable Meshes. It also helps with viewport performance with 1,000’s of objects when you are viewing as Edged Faces or Wireframe since it is only drawing a fraction of the edges. A process that nPower Translators does when converting BREPs to meshes, which results in a much easier to navigate scene since you aren’t staring at a million tris, only the edges that were originally the edges of trimmed surfaces when they existed as BREPs. Power Edge Mesh is just an Editable Mesh, with some edges turned invisible so that a CAD import looks as though you are still looking at a BREP. Warning – the results can be most cases useless. You want unwrapping explicitly using only your seams, no matter how stretched, deviated or deformed? Then use organic mode, and turn stretch factor to 1. _”It might be wishful thinking on my part to have existing seams combined together and not split at the same time with hard surfaces.”_

Must check later, but I do not know any other concept on this planet that flatten (atlas) UVs and keeps seems, this would be a customized pizza not listed in the regular menu. In HardSurface Mode there is no keep-seams, as far as I know – this is explicitly based on an angle.

I bet when I would see it, everything would be clear to me in a second. On the other side – I see only words from you, no screenshot, no model. Export and import it as OBJ, convert it in something compatible to see what you can get as a clean topology and then you can work with it.

We can deal with meshes, but for what you do there, you need wizardry. I know this plugin NPower exists, but do not know anybody using it. Invisible edges, “power edge mesh” (what on earth is this Exot!!?) this is definitely not standard max geometry.Ĭan you apply on it any Max Modifier at all, like Turbosmooth or Lattice and get any usable result? Are these NURBs? Ja, ok, ok, from all geometries on this planet you have picked for testing some third party derivate and you wonder why it does not work.

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