Exporting Animation to .3ds

[mouj]

Howdy !

sounds funky, the .3ds format usually contains animation data.
I'd say try to use another file format maybe, if not maybe it has to do with the soft bodies dynamics, so you may want to try and bake it prior to exporting it ?
(there's a bake mesh script available from scriptspot.com)

mouj

[Gilgamesh]

Yeah, the baking thing is exactly what I was looking for. Is there a way to do it in native MAX 5? Otherwise, what's the script called?
Thanks for the reply

[mouj]

Yup ! It's called BakeMesh, just go over to scriptspot (http://www.scriptspot.com) and perform a search on "bake", it's part of the FooTools .
(here) (http://www.footools.com/)
Not sure there is a way to do this in Max without a script.

mouj

[Stroker]

http://www.footools.com edit: what mouj said

I installed Bake last night and ran into a problem. The website says to use fooFunctions for Max 5.x, else use jbFunction. I'm Max 5.x and it didn't work out that way for me. I was getting funky errors. Finally figured it out: delete fooFunc and keep JbFunc.

So far I am more than happy with it. I baked a decent sized character animation and it worked damn fine.

I'm not sure about exporting mesh/vert animation in a single 3ds file. I went looking for a fix and found a Max 3 script called Save 3DS Sequence, but it's for Max 3 and I don't know how to get it to work. Besides, this script outputs a sequence of files (hence the name). Or maybe I'm missing something in native Max toolset. A sequence of 3DS files might work for you if your software allows you to append frames or something from a sequence of files.

In my case, I got lucky and found an exporter for the final format that I was shooting for. I got lucky.

[mouj]

yeah i remember that i got some errors too when using it, but playing with the parameters could get me where i wanted.
It's true that i forgot to point out that it needs a couple functions and extensions to run with Max, and i do think that some of them have new versions to work with Max 5.

I'm quite sure that .3ds would save animation data, but the software you'll bring it into will need to be able to read it ?

So indeed you might have to save out a sequence of .3ds files (one for each frame), or find another format...

hope this could help somehow : )

mouj

[Gilgamesh]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll give those a try.

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