Which version of 3dsmax?

[Rabbit]

Apologies first if I'm posting in the wrong place.......

I have had a few tentative attempts and knocking together an Age with some moderate success with Blender, but then had to put it all on hold for personal reasons.

Assuming I were to resume my Ages, I guess life may be a bit easier if I were to use the 'real thing'. My question would be, What is the best version of 3dsm to use with Age Building? Would it be an advantage to get hold of version 7 with the Cyan plugin? Are the later versions better to use? Are there plugins available for later versions?

Is it possible to reverse engineer an Age easily? i.e. import a MOUL Age back into 3ds? I have tried this with Blender, but had issues putting the textures back in and gave up with it.

I'm just exploring possibilities at the moment. I have read Andylegate's excellent tuts and would maybe follow his example of modelling with Blender and then importing to 3ds for everything else.

[Sirius]

About reverse-engineering Ages:
Cyan never wrote such importer for Max (as far as I know).
The only possible way to do this would be to import the Age with PyPRP's Blender Importer, then export it as a file Max can import (collada for instance). Problems:
- exporting from Blender to Collada and then import it in Max is a sure way to lose some data because of all the differences between these.
- importing the Ages with PyPRP will lose all the logic (regions, clickables, etc will be here but all the logic links between them will be lost)
- although some versions of PyPRP can import vertices, textures, UV coordinates, a LOT of data will be lost.

For instance, I figured out PyPRP won't import UV matrices (in short: even with the correct UV mapping, your texture will still look stretched).
It doesn't tell which UV map each texture uses, stencils are not set, it doesn't set the correct settings for textures multiplied by other textures, etc.
Animations are not imported either.

PyPRP is also limited by Blender materials. In Plasma, a material is a list of layers, each one of them containing a color, shade settings, flags... In Blender, most of these settings are set IN the material, and are the same for each of the textures in the material. So, for meshes with a lot of alpha textures (for instance: Gahreesen's landscape), you will never get the same as in Plasma (Blender can do it, but in a completely different way).

However PyPRP is very useful to learn from Cyan's Ages and import some meshes in Blender. It simply can't handle everything.

[Charura]

Maybe the 'powers that be' that provide Blender and attempt to create a perfect universe that co-exists' would make it possible to 'blend' with 3dxmax..I'm a dreamer...I see all futures for everyone to come together and breathe....lol...I'm still learning both at a slow rate...

[Karkadann]

Is it even possible to create an age importer for Max.
Since the info on their plug-ins is so limited we may be able to learn more about how to use their plug-ins if we can see how their ages are put together In Max/Plasma

[Christopher]

It is possible to write an importer for Max, but it's not easy. Because of that I doubt someone will write one in the near future.

[Karkadann]

I wonder how much something like this would cost
and who would I contact

[Rabbit]

Thanks for the responses.

If I can ask this again, if were to resume my Ages, what is the best version of 3dsm to use with Age Building? Would it be an advantage to get hold of version 7 with the Cyan plugin? Are the later versions better to use? Are there plugins available for later versions?

Thanks.

[Christopher]

I would suggest you to use a newer version of 3dsm. For example 2012 (don't know if the plugin works with 2013 yet...). As far as I know the plugin for the newer Max version should work. An other advantage of using a newer 3dsm is that you can use Autodesk Mudbox in combination with it. It's an easy-to-use program for sculpting and painting an object and export diffuse and normal maps. So it's a lot easier to texture things you made and add detail to it.

Christopher

[Karkadann]

It is possible to write an importer for Max, but it's not easy. Because of that I doubt someone will write one in the near future.

Something I just thought of, If some one did write an age importer for Max it would be a lot easer to add fan made ages to the Gehn shard. all you would hafta do is import the age to Max and export it for your shard
Bada Bing Bada Boom

[Christopher]

It is possible to write an importer for Max, but it's not easy. Because of that I doubt someone will write one in the near future.

Something I just thought of, If some one did write an age importer for Max it would be a lot easer to add fan made ages to the Gehn shard. all you would hafta do is import the age to Max and export it for your shard
Bada Bing Bada Boom

Well, it's not that easy... You would have to write an importer for both prp versions (tPots and MOULa) for this to work. If you simply write an importer for MOULa ages you still can't import ages, which are exported with blender.

Christopher