Hey there everyone

I've been playing around with making staures for oblivion, under the tutelage of a friend, but one thing that has got us stumped is that when i export the mesh using the porper plugins, nothing at all shows up in Nifskope (although we sometimes get a sword handle). My level of modelling is very basic, and i'm not the most technical of people.
Anyway, what i've done is this:
Imported a body and posed it. Attached all the meshes together then deleted the skeleton. I've made a smooth modifier and exported the mesh fine. Then i create a UVmap modifier and export it, but there is no mesh in nifskope. This has me really puzzled. This is my first time using 3dsmax9 and my friend has 3dsmax7. We've puzzled over this for the last couple of nights, he reckons that the UVmap causing this kind of issue is rather curious and 3dsmax should not be behaving like this. So we decided to enlist the help of experts.

Please can someone help?, this is really confusing.

The file before UVmapping can be found here:
http://www.2shared.com/file/11674446/5a3ae9e8/statue04.html

exported ok. sounds/looks like you left the modifiers in the stack, and never reset the xform. leaving those modifiers in the stack probably was your main problem.

what I did- collasped the modifier stack. Quaded the mesh. Deleted the duplicated body and feet meshes. welded verts. set up smooth groups. tweeked a couple edge loops on the neck(were looking funky to me). added a material. moved it up a little bit in the Z axis. reset xform. export.

nif- http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y7CFUZ38

Thanks Ghogiel, thats awesome!

np, just collaspes all your modifers before export. the only thing you'll want is skin in there. and make sure it has a material with a map in the diffuse slot.

So could you please tell me exactly what you did step by step? and why? this way i can fix it myself in future.

I did that already! I thought that was already a pretty good breakdown of the workflow.

opened max file. select object> right click>convert to editable poly(this collaspes all modifiers as well). noticed you had duplicate body and feet. deleted those subojects. select all verts> weld at 0.01. set up smoothgroups- most was smoothed at default 45, except the body- which was higher. moved a coulpe edgeloops on the neck - they were looking a bit funky. dragged a dds texture into the material editor. dragged that material onto the mesh. moved it up a little bit in the z axis. so its feet were roughly at 0 on the z plane. reset xform. collasped the stack. export.

It can't get much more simpler than that. took 5mins maximum.