how come in a face list in 3D Studio Max there are more faces than vertices ? I thought faces were pointers to the vertices arrays ? Thanks!
Maybe your faces are double sided? I dunno, never used 3D Studio Max myself.
Think of a cube. A cube got eight vertices, one for each corner. A cube got six sides, each side is a square which is made up of two triangles (=face). So summing this up, we get eight vertices, and twelve faces.
The reason for this is that at least three faces shares the save vertex. A face CAN contain pointer to vertices, but can also contain index to vertices in a vertex array, which is more efficent, since you only have to specify each vertex once. In the cube example, using three veritces per face, we would get 12*3=36 verices, but now we only have 8 and get the same result.