Hi everyone,

I've been given the opportunity to provide some ship models for a TV production. MoI is the best weapon I have to do these but the animator for the production uses Max and has specified model delivery in 3ds or Max format. I can't do Max (unless someone knows of a free/cheap converter) so I'm left with 3ds.

Certain parts are going to need to be movable I think, guns and the like. I'd like to be able to group these and have the individual objects maintain their own rotation axes. Am I right in thinking that 3ds is pretty limited in maintaining groups of objects and there axes? How does MoI handle 3ds export?

I'm open to any and all suggestions related to delivery of the finished models.

Many thanks,

Mark

Hi Mark, well unfortunately your customer has kind of boxed you in awkwardly by only accepting those 2 formats.

The native Max format is not documented by Autodesk so pretty much nothing other than Max itself is able to create those files.

Then the 3DS formats is a very old antiquated format that actually comes way back from the ancient 3D Studio for MS-DOS version.

3DS format is generally a last resort choice because it is limited in many ways, it can only have triangle polygons, it has 16-bit era limits in it such as no more than 65536 faces inside of a single mesh object, and cannot hold vertex normal smoothing information, which tends to make it difficult to get high quality shading with that format, since smoothing will be done by just an average of adjacent faces rather than having the surface normals come from the actual NURBS surface.

I think that there is some kind of mechanism in 3DS format for specifying a hierarchy of shapes but MoI does not attempt to use it currently. Since 3DS is not a good format in general, it just is not very likely to get a whole lot of development time or improvements in the future since it is kind of like trying to put lipstick on a pig.


Max has in general throughout its existence been poor in handling imported data from other programs. For example most 3D programs are able to use the OBJ format to transfer data pretty well, but Max has never really had a very high quality OBJ importer in it.


Probably the best way to get high quality transfer into Max is to use FBX format (as long as you have an up-to-date FBX import plugin in Max which is available for free), which seems to be the most (or possibly the only) actively developed importer for Max.

I added an FBX export into MoI 2.0 specifically to try and help getting things into Max better since it does not handle other common formats as well as other programs.


But currently MoI only attempts to write out grouping type information (in the form of style assignments in MoI transferring into Material assignments in the exported data, and also combining objects with the same name into a single large mesh object) for OBJ and LWO formats.

MoI doesn't have anything like setting up pivot points for animation use.


Probably to make a proper grouping for animation that would need to be done by doing some organization within Max after importing the basic data in FBX format.

- Michael

Thanks Michael, I had suspected that was the case.

I will suggest FBX import to my contact. I think I've found the plugin at Autodesk here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=10775855

There is also a converter there. Perhaps I can export to trueSpace as obj, set up my pivot points and then convert to FBX. Some experimenting required I think.

Cheers.

Edit: I've just found that Wings imports and exports FBX. Also possibly Anim8or and probably Blender?

Hi Mark,

> I think I've found the plugin at Autodesk here:

Yup, that's the place - for transfer into Max, it is a good idea to make sure the Max FBX importer is updated to the latest version available there.

Then with that in place, FBX format seems to be the best transfer into Max because it supports getting vertex normals over which makes for higher quality smooth shading.


> Perhaps I can export to trueSpace as obj, set up my pivot
> points and then convert to FBX.

Possibly, at least it could be worth a try.

But I would not be too surprised if it was also focused more on transferring geometry over and not necessarily full animation structures.

- Michael

I don't see fbx inside Anim8or
And not inside the normal Blender

Hi Mark some good news from Autodesk, 3ds Max 2010 has SAT data translator, see demo video here http://www.autodesk.com/us/3dsmaxdesign/connection_extension/sat/3ds_max_design_extension_sat_820x510.html (note in the video they import .SAT files from Rhino)
I think that's the best way to go in to 3ds Max and if needed do the conversion in there. if your associate does not have 2010 then FBX is your best bet.

Also it seams to me that Autodesk is pushing .SAT among other products like autocad, revit, inventor etc.

Hi Pilou,

I let myself get confused by a Google search regarding anim8or. Am I the only one who finds Google almost useless these days?

Thanks Neo for the link. I will have to ask them for their Max version. This sounds like an excellent option.