A bunch of questions that need answers: - what engines support gmax? - is gmax capable of making professional models? - where is a good site for more gmax tutorials?

1) http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
2) Yes
3) http://www.gmaxsupport.com/

BTW, Gmax was created to allow gamers to create content for existing games, ie modders. If you want to use GMax to create content for new games, you must contact Discrete about licensing.

Yup. Or you buy milkshape3d(20$)and you get the (in my honest opinion) best lowpoly 3d Tool ever!

Nowhere in the licence agreement does it say you can''t create content for your own games using gmax. You''ll just have trouble saving your models in a useful format. Look for the open source md3 exporter, unlike the id one it''s got no strings attached.

Hijacking the topic, as I like to do - how do you generate a model with multiple animations in something like gmax? It seems to my untrained eyes to only be able to save/edit a single animation.

Ive played around with gmax and animation for awhile now. and from what ive discovered gmax is made for only one animation at a time. There are ways around this, one of which is an od use of keyframes....


I made a head, i wanted it to blink and grin at the same time. The best way i found was to pick the frames where ti blinks, then set up the keyframes. But then in the frame IMMIDATLY after the last one where it blinks, put in an empty keyframe. Then at the end of the nod animation put in an empyt keyframe.


It kinda of tricks GMax into working thr gith way. GMax still thinkins the eye is moving and being animated, but it is not. The "Motion" is it sitting still. doing this i made a really neato animation. Then faced the problem of rendering it and turning it into a useful format. I found several tools that will alow you to go into command line and render it, but only as a still picture in the form of a .tga or targa.

I still havent been able to make it into a mpg or some other format i can jsut run to watch it in windows media player..

The single animation per file workflow in GMAX is consistent with how all animation is done in the games companies I''ve worked for. Putting together multiple animations is a game runtime issue, not a toolset issue. I wrote a tool for our company to let artists preview the layering of animations on top of each other so that they can see how they will look in the game before the programmer hooks them up.

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Original post by fractoid
Nowhere in the licence agreement does it say you can''t create content for your own games using gmax. You''ll just have trouble saving your models in a useful format. Look for the open source md3 exporter, unlike the id one it''s got no strings attached.

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I agree that the license agreement doesnt explcitly state that you cant do that, so I asked one the Discreet reps that responds at the Gmax forums. He agreed that the license agreement doesn''t explicitly disallow that usage, but he stated that access to the SDK was behind a license and that the creation and distribution of plugins is monitered by their legal people.

I would also like to point out that the license agreement contains a clause that says it can be updated/changed etc. at any time and for any reason.

Its best just to steer clear of a potential legal mess, especially when their are so many quality open source tools available.