Hi there!
This may seem like an odd question, but in my experience, Blender’s FBX importer is incredibly janky and breaks easily unless you use super specific versions and whatnot.
Essentially I have a few rigged player models that are all done in 3Ds Max, they have animations and such all ready to go. However, I work with a team and we’ve been getting a lot of members that use Blender. (including myself)
We develop for a Source based game, so we use the Blender Source Tools addon and have just been using SMD files, but unfortunately the Blender Source Tools addon constantly breaks smoothing and normals which breaks lighting in-game.
So that brings me to the main point of wanting to instead take the original source models in 3Ds Max, and export them reliably to FBX or any format that works really to create .blend files for us to work from. The problem being that importing the resulting .fbx file into Blender usually results in something really broken, and importing .DAE exported from Max seems to break vertex groups and thus the rig is useless.
All I want is a model format that is easily interchangeable between 3ds Max 2016 and Blender. Are there some specific settings I should just use with the FBX exporter, or is there a better interchangeable format that we can use?