3DS Max to Blender...

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1

Hey everyone.

I’ve recently come across a problem I hope you can help me with. An artist who I work with is creating character models for our game using 3D Studio Max 2009, and to save some of the headaches when importing them into XNA, we came up with the idea of transferring the model into blender then rigging and animating.

The problem were facing though is that 3DS throws a lot of baggage into the mix when exporting as OBJ, and when we try to import it into blender, the UI freezes. My question is has anyone else come across this problem, and does anyone have any ideas towards what we could do to get around it.

To add a bit more info to the mix, when I examined the OBJ file (I’m the programmer) I noticed that 3DS exports polygons with more or less than 3 sides (even when set to triangulate).

The final part of our woes is that it’d be nice to preserve quads on the mesh as it gets transferred over, so far we only used triangulation to see if that could fix the issue we were having.

Thanks in advance for any help you give.

Aimee

2

Have tried waiting, if the ui freezes it means that it is importing the mesh, and may take a minute.

3

Yea we gave it a good half hour for sanity sakes, and were not exactly using a slow computer. I can’t for the life of me think why it would freeze like it does.

4

I exported from Max a 500K polys tree (in OBJ), no freezes when importing. About quads, same problem here, Blender imported tris.

5

i got no problems exporting obj from max2009 to blender.

  1. in blender: add monkey ->set subdiv to 5 ->apply modifier (~500k)
  2. export obj from blender with default setting.
  3. import obj in max-> same mesh (quads only)
  4. export obj from max to blender (dont! use the blender preset in max obj exporter)
  5. reimport the obj monk in blender (still same mesh -quads only)

my max obj export setting (might be the default settings):

6

No problems with Max 2012. Downloaded a free car model from turbosquid in .max format. Exported as an obj, imported into blender, all default import/export settings, and there were quads where there was supposed to be quads and tris where there were supposed to be tris.

7

You could try importing the obj file in Accutrans, and save to obj or lwo as an intermediate step. Test if that works.

8

I think there is another exporter for .obj files for MAX. The Guru Ware exporter I think it is called.