Thanks to a suggestion by LetterRip (many thanks), we got animations from 3DS Max into Blender through this route:
3DS Max to MotionBuilder to (export) *bvh to Blender…
Maybe it can help someone else 
Does it work with bones and skinned meshes?
Sorry, we are at the beginning of this pipeline BUT my personal guess would be to think it’s likely.
The first experiment that succeeded was made using a biped, but Blender wouldn’t know what that is and the armature is there, soooo… we still have to experiment ! :o
Keep us updated on your experiments then
cheers
Hmmm
Don’t get me wrong that sounds cool but why would you want to get from 3DS to Blender.
What I mean is most if not all engines support importing 3DS animations but I use Blender and it is almost impossible to get animations from Blender into the engine.
Hey Matro,
If you are a game company and you have a bunch of animations and rigs and you want to convert over to Blender this tool will make that decision so much easier. Most game companies don't want to lose their assets that they spent literally millions of dollars developing by switching to a new package. So a tool like this would be very important to people wanting to switch.
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
Nate,
Yes we are a small game company and we do use Blender and the real problem still remains getting things out of Blender. Now over the last year Blender has improved greatly and we are very hopeful but unless we can get bones to export into Collada or some working exporter then we will be forced to use another pipeline and that brings us right where you are speaking.
Now I love Blender and have been using it from 2.37 and will continue to use it and pray for the day that I can export my Rigged meshes into my engine or any other engine.
nice use of intermediary format. I looked into taking on the “official” exchange format, and got scared. If mesh can be saved as obj, and armatures as bvh, I think that takes care of a lot of the 3DS to Blender bridge. yea!
wait…
I must be missing something in this thread…
Sorry if I say some nonsense…
But why don’t you use *.md5 format? That doom3 format is free, you can do has has be done for loads of engines, a loader for your engine, is an ascii format, md5mesh is fo rmesh and bones, and I think md5anim for animation. The der_ton plugin export it according to that, logically. That man made an outstanding work, he provided a fully working md5 importer for blender, a md5 exporter for blender, and both i/o for 3ds Max as well… Ah…maybe you already tried with 2009 and does not work… .It should work… a maxcript tends to work after several new versions of max appear…often many…even if is a plugin…
is it cause you can’t get to work the blender scripts? easy, just use the 2.40 or 41 which was latest i had news of was updated, to make final export. You probably can bake new cosntraints to regular keyframes, then open the .blend in that a bit older Blender.
Dunno, I tested to work fully for my char anim purposes : the max exporter, the blender importer, the blender exporter. he had a lot of care for detail as well. Imo, that plugin should be absolutely added to the oficial release of Blender. Is key for so many engines, and the fact that it even support porting normal maps (well, not the plugin I suppose, the format, as for those times we hadnt yet normal maps in blender). And a very clever bit for some of us worked in shareware games market… the anim file is EXTREMELY small in size… this is key to reduce the download size of a heavily animation based game, and download size is crucial in that market. If that woul not be enough, apart from putting in the ascii file, for example in text editor of Blender, the path to texture (texture name, putting that one in same folder) in the part where says “shader”, the exporter is probaly one of the most problem free I have ever seen in any bones and weights format I have seen to date. Imo, this collection of md5 plugins deserve a lot of honor…
Excuse me if the thing goes for another route or I am missing something… Lately happens often to me… But I thought only perhaps you are missing the information, I don’t know. Would be a pitty to leave blender as tool for the project just for that…
The plugins you find 'em here, in editing and modeling forum section I think… you need to pay attention to grab very latest version, as those are multi pages threads… :
NO! Sorry…
here:
http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/MD5_%28file_format%29#Tools
looks like later exporter supports 2.41 or maybe newer, and it takes in consideration IK or other constraints (from then I guess) , no need the usual bake on these kind of formats.
yep…and the blender importer supports 2.41 as well, has anim support, and everything, supporting even the newer MD5Version 11 , for another game…
I took the big work…have downloaded what i guess are latest versions and read a bit of the release texts… as I also am interested to track these plugins… seems the max exporter tested to work for Max 2008, so I guess 2009 as well… provided, probably, you care to have in the moment of export, the mesh as “edit mesh” modifier, and wether you use biped or not (i tend to) , applied an skin modifier. As most game engine exporters prefer. My luck is I prefer skin Max’s modifier to physique, by far. So I just apply skin modifier to my mesh rigged with biped… (or bones when needed)
Imo, is a possible way from Max to blender till FBX importer gets to be complete…
But true that often fbx varies, with a new version of max…Another one that’d be great to have in oficial Blender release for ever…
Luckily, *.md5 specs change more rarely and more “openly” than fbx ones… Some game coders working at big titles now, prefered md5 for being more clear for a programmer than other formats…whatever the heck means that… 
Edit: and of course, now I see is mentioned the use of intermediary formats… the md5 exports everything… mesh, bones, anim, weights, normal maps, I think even more…