Will Max 2024 be supported?

Hi,

I can’t find much into around this, but is there a plan to support Max 2024?

Max’s exporter is too basic compared to the Babylon one, mainly with animation groups.

I can back-save to Max 2023, but I’d rather not :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Dean

Hello,

See: BabylonJS/Exporters: Exporters for Babylon.js and gltf file formats (github.com), tldr: the exporters are no longer in active development, but if anyone from the community would like to step in and contribute we’d gladly welcome it :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your reply :slight_smile:

May I ask why they’re not being supported? Is there a viable alternative? 3Ds Max’s built in exporter is very limited, and can’t imagine this being a threat to the Babylon exporter?

Unfortunately we don’t have any available bandwidth for it as we’re working on many projects :sweat_smile: @PatrickRyan might be aware of an alternative?

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@Mr.P.xYz, we have never considered the native Autodesk exporters a threat to our exporters. Quite the opposite, our exporters were created solely because there weren’t native exporters in Max or Maya. We kept them around with the intent of sunsetting them when Autodesk came out with their own native exporters. We are now at the point of most of the industry supporting the format as a native export and we know it is on the roadmap for Autodesk. We feel like it is time to focus elsewhere as we have many versions of the exporters available which will always continue to work. We also welcome any contributions from the community to update the exporters in any way from supporting new versions to adding functionality.

Hopefully full glTF export and import support will come to Max and Maya soon, but we don’t have any visibility into that timeline. We are as excited to see it as anyone. In the mean time, There are always the previous version exporters available. Also, there are plenty of other tools that support glTF import and/or export like Blender, Houdini, C4D, Modo, Substance Painter, and more.

Additionally, there are other converters that can be used and/or scripted like the Facebook glTF converter or Convert3D which is one I am looking into as a scriptable alternative to our exporters.

I know this probably isn’t the answer you were looking for, but hopefully none of us will have to wait much longer for native support of glTF from Autodesk.

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Totally understand you can only spread yourself so thin.

Re Autodesk, their current exporter is laughable, and barely worth using, and from past experiences with Autodesk, they move slowly, so I’m not personally expecting anything to be as good as the Babylon exporter anytime soon.

Sadly I’m not a programmer at all, but what work is involved in making the exporter work with 2024?
I have installed it into Max 2024, and things like defining the animation groups still work well, so I can do all the practical work still within 2024, then I just back save to 2023 and export.

I will check out the other exporters, thanks for the links.

Cheers,
Dean

It does look like there were community contributions to support Max 2024. This is the repo that shows the files needed to update to a new version. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a template for support of new versions as there are always going to be changes in the software that we either need to support or change our exporters to handle.

The challenge for us has always been that we are a plugin for the software, and thus don’t have access to the core engine. That means we have to use work-arounds or approximations to support glTF exports such as needing to channel pack an ORM texture just to get an occlusion texture out of an Arnold material. Whatever full implementation that Autodesk does will be so much better integrated as they can create a full workflow for authoring a glTF to spec from end to end. Their timing has always been driven by the size of their team, which is not large. So they have the same challenges we do where we have to allocate our resources to the most important features and improvements.

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Hi,

Just picking this up again, as I will be using GLTF / GLB soon for a new project.

If people are no longer using the exporter with 3Ds Max, then what is the standard workflow for controlling materials, animations, etc?

Are people adding textures and shaders in another way?

I’m just curious about workflows, as I’ve only used Max to control, then export, and maybe tweak in something like Gestalator.

Thanks,
Dean

@Mr.P.xYz, I still use the Babylon exporter for Maya, though I only upgrade Maya when I have to and still use 2023 for both Maya and Max. If there comes a point where I need to upgrade past the point of support for the Babylon exporters and Autodesk has not yet released native glTF support, I will likely have to do something like export to FBX from Maya and reconstruct materials in Blender to export. Not what I would want to do long term and may make me change my primary authoring tool to something other than Maya that supports glTF. I certainly hope that Autodesk is just around the corner with native support, though.