I''ve been working on a 3ds reader and now it finally worked. But when I was working on it I used a model that was only a box, for testing purposes. Then, when I tried with other models I noticed that it only works with boxes. If I use anything else like spheres or cylinders nothing shows up. After days of work I thought it finally would work, but no, of course not... something had to go wrong. I suppose it''s me who don''t know enough about the 3ds format. Anyone who can help or I''ll throw this damn computer out of my window soon...

I,like you,also ventured down the path of deciphering the 3ds max file format.But then! I saw the light and found out it is WAY easier to actually write a max plugin or MaxScript that would export all the data that you need (vertices,faces,tex coords,normals,groups,etc) to your own file formt.Trust me this will save you ALOT of time.Just read up on writing your own max plugin (It''s not THAT hard).

I''m in the process of writing my own exporter plugin right now and I''m almost done.And it way easier than reading that stupid 3ds file !

I know that''s not what you wanted to hear but I''m just offering you words of advice

Hmmm, I might just try that...
You know where I can find some info about that?

I had another idea as well. Since I''ve already written a .ASE loader I could make a program that converts a ASE file to my own binary format. But I heard somewhere that there is bugs in the ASE exporter and they won''t allways be saved properly. Anyone knows anything about that?

And, please, if anyone knows the solution to my first problem, tell me, i''d like to solve it...

If you are using directx you can use max plugin included with d3d8 to export to x file format. You can then easily load the x files and convert them into a vertex buffer.

So technically, even if your project is not using directx you could write a program that converts .x files to lists of vertices. . . of course this would end up involving two steps instead of one.

1) export .max file as .x file.
2) run converter that uses directx to output vertex list.

DmGoober

I just finished mine to for implenting in my engine.
I restarted 3 times and when I finished i noticed
that i had just reinvented the wheel and my code
worked just the same as the code
that comes with the original manual .
But I was still proud because it needed less code, it was more
optimized and was just for my purposes .

I used 3 or 4 different manuals for reference and used the
chevy as model from beginning on (in case you wanted to know).