• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Need help converting Gmax->Blender

Vitus

Vitus

Resource contributor
Messages
1,480
Country
newzealand
Hi guys!
I struggled with this a while ago and at some point I just gave up on it. I would like to convert some of my projects from Gmax into Blender, or any format that Blender can read. Instead of spending hours trying to set up a workflow for this, I thought I rather ask around. I'm sure some of you have a the workflow worked out and don't need to spend as much time with this as I'd do.

There's around a dozen models I'd like to have converted and I do need the UVs to come with it. A tricky part might be that most of those models are quite large, north of 100,000 verts.
I am happy to compensate you for the time you spend with this.

PM me if you're interested.

Cheers,
Vitus
 
Hi,

If you have a MDL of your project and its textures, just use MCX of Arno and save it as Wavefront.obj
Blender can import your Wavefront.obj and its UV mapping.
 
What Lagaffe said.

GMax -> MDL file -> ModelConverter -> Wavefront OBJ -> Blender or 3ds Max

Good: UV maps are retained
Bad: MSFS materials, all animations, all smoothing groups, all object names and all mouserect and visibility tags will be lost

Restoring materials and object names, including resmoothing might take two or three days, but reanimating everything might take a week (or longer).
To restore proper object positions, it might be worth to export one Wavefront OBJ at keyframe 0 and another at keyframe 100 and load both into Blender to ensure that you get your part rotation angles right when reanimating everything.
 
Yes, you are right but as if I understand the question, the aim was to recover : objects and UV mapping.

You have also the possibility to use fbx as exchange format but I think that is impossible to recover all your stuff : objects, animations, mouse rect, UV mapping in only one conversion.
Some scripts exist to convert Gmax in 3DSMax but all your stuff isn't conserved la: animations are lost so ...
 
Last edited:
I think objects and UV maps are really the only things that are retained after conversion from one file format to another.
 
Hey guys!
Thanks for the input, but to be honest, I just want it done. I read up on the process a while ago, tried a couple of methods with mixed results and high levels of stress and frustration. I simply don't want to go down that path again.
I appreciate your feedback!
 
Define "I just want it done".

Mesh+UVs in Blender or restoring the complete model in Blender, including animations and any tags?
 
I'm not the OP, but I'm interested in this too. If there is a process to bring the model into Blender without losing the animations, I would love to know about it (as long as it's less complicated than re-doing the animations from scratch). I'm working on bringing an FS9 aircraft into XP11 and currently am in the process of re-creating the animations. Having a way to keep animations would be very helpful.
 
Theoretically, a Blender add-on for importing MSFS-grade X and XANIM files should be possible as this one for Call Of Duty seems to have the capability:
github.com

GitHub - CoDEmanX/blender-cod: Blender Add-On for Call of Duty® modding

Blender Add-On for Call of Duty® modding. Contribute to CoDEmanX/blender-cod development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
Grabbing the X/ANIM files from MCX isn't much of a problem. These are basically text files, so the sky is the limit in terms of target formats anyway. Restoring basic material settings and importing the mesh and UV maps are (probably) the most straightforward of the tasks. The biggest challenge is deriving the part hierarchy from the source files, converting the keyframe format and derive the pivot points.
The X/XANIM file format is explained here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/microsoft-esp/cc526973(v=msdn.10)

Unless somebody is willing to spend the or months writing a suitable importer, manually restoring part hierarchy and animations is the safest bet. It's all a matter of potential time saving such an importer could afford and, of course, whether spending time on something that is mostly used for legally questionable endeavors is worth it in the first place or not.
 
Vitus said:
Hi guys!
I struggled with this a while ago and at some point I just gave up on it. I would like to convert some of my projects from Gmax into Blender, or any format that Blender can read. Instead of spending hours trying to set up a workflow for this, I thought I rather ask around. I'm sure some of you have a the workflow worked out and don't need to spend as much time with this as I'd do.

There's around a dozen models I'd like to have converted and I do need the UVs to come with it. A tricky part might be that most of those models are quite large, north of 100,000 verts.
I am happy to compensate you for the time you spend with this.

PM me if you're interested.

Cheers,
Vitus
Click to expand...
There's a process I'm using now that can export the model only, no animations.
 
I have a feature for MCX in development that allows saving animations to FBX and DAE. So in the future that will help.
 
@Vitus did you get those models you wanted converted? Happy to show you my process for GMAX -> 3DSMax - Blender. Works great. No export is going to transfer animations though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top