Hello,

The Liberate Ryzom project is desperately needing help to try and get a textured animated model to export from 3d studio MAX into some sort of usable open file format. It is a biped/physique setup, pretty standard, so a MAX expert shouldn't have a problem figuring it out... please help! =) Read below for more.

Once one model can be exported, we'll be writing scripts to automatically convert the droves of gigs of free media from the Ryzom project into an open format for everyone to use!

Let me give more background on this:

For those who aren't familiar, tons of free art (as well as code) for a commercial full scale MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online game) were released as open source. Read more here:

http://dev.ryzom.com/

Just to clarify Ryzom is a REAL MMO, tons of high quality stuff in there. Sheer gigs of 3d studio media - animated characters, creatures, meshes, textures. All split up into pieces and animated as you might imagine as needed for an MMO.

The problem! I have been trying to convert the media files (currently in 3d studio MAX formats) into an open format. My goal, to create an open archive of artwork to be used in open tools like Blender, and for the public to work with to fuel indie games and more open source software. The 3ds max plugins as part of the Ryzom project are a bit complicated and hard to reuse. We're hoping for a more elegant, simpe maxscript solution, but will hack those up if necessary.

So I've created a site here for collaboration:

http://sites.google....site/freeryzom/

I've attached to that site a sample Ryzom character:

http://sites.google..../home/fyros.zip

Also MAX plugins that get me *close* to exporting him to MD5:

Physique to skin conversion, needed by some maxscripts:

http://sites.google....kin_Max2012.zip

Der Ton's famous md5 export script, slightly modified:

http://sites.google....me/md5export.ms

Of course the whole bunch of Ryzom media can be downloaded here:

https://sourceforge....ets.7z/download

Looking forward to any thoughts, tips, etc... let me know if anyone is able to do an export, or has any insight on how to get at least a sample character exported out of max and working! And please feel free to drop by the project site and say hi! http://sites.google....site/freeryzom/

Thanks =)

- svf

Why do you not use FBX ? It is a good format from autodesk (therefore with good support for 3d max ?) and is widely supported by other tools like blender. Additionally autodesk has a converter tool which could transform FBX into other formats, like collada.

Why do you not use FBX ? It is a good format from autodesk (therefore with good support for 3d max ?) and is widely supported by other tools like blender. Additionally autodesk has a converter tool which could transform FBX into other formats, like collada.

Hi Ashaman,

Yes this was one of the first approaches I've tried. Ryzom media is 3ds Max bipeds attached to physique meshes, and when trying to export/reload into Blender there were serious distortions in the mesh and animations.

If you have (or anyone) experience in doing this, I've linked 3ds MAX meshes in my post that this could be attempted with - maybe I'm doing something wrong...

I do know for example the Unity engine uses FBX to good success with Bipeds/Physique et. al., so maybe there is a trick to it.