Why does Blender mess up .3DS imports?

I am working on a comics project where I am using 3D models to supplement for architectural backgrounds because I am not a good digital painter at the moment. Basically I have been scouring for models from Archibase.net. I’ve found a lot of good ones, but when I try importing a .3DS, Blender messes up the locations of everything! I also tried exporting a .MAX model from 3DS Max 6 in .3DS, and Blender did the same thing. It was of a computer and monitor and all the model centers were in the right place in MAX, but in Blender, none of the pieces stayed where they originally were. The computer pieces were all over the place.

I don’t know what Blender’s problem with this format is, but I think this is something that should be addressed by the developers. Has anyone else had trouble with this? Are there workarounds? Is there something that can be done manually by the user in the Python code to repair it?

Cheers, Suu999

http://www.blender.org/development/report-a-bug/

Please use this.

Martin

i could be wrong but i don’t think the 3DS format can store the relative locations of objects… it can only store mesh data…

I have very similar experiences, but I only have a few files that I would like to convert so I never really looked into any workarounds. I have noticed though that I got better results in an older version of Blender (much older - probably 2.42 or 2.43 or so) than with the recent ones, so you could try that. Another option would be to open them in SketchUp and resave it in the Collada format . Or basically open and resave in any other program as the 3ds format is quite common.