Converting 3ds 8 scene to 7

[Adam H. Stewart]

I apologize if this question has been answered here already, I did a couple of searches and couldn't find it. I just bought a scene from turbosquid and the bloody thing is in 3ds8. I have 8 but it is not set up on my farm and from what I hear it cannot be trusted. The objects are too large to exported 3ds style, in addition I have some splines that I need to keep, it would be nice to keep the modifiers aswell ( it is a globe )
So does anybody have an idea how I can retrograde the sucker to something sane like 7 or 7.5 ?

Thanks as always for your help.

[Dynedain]

Take a look on scriptspot for BoBo's File Format (formerly called Back From Five).

It *may* work.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks

Thanks I'll give it a shot - it is driving me nuts that they didn't make the thing in an earlier file version, who is working with 8 ? - very few people that I can tell - thanks again.

[ShaunDon]

More people than you know. Most firms (including mine) are on subscription for no other reason than maintaining compatibility with every max file out there. Maybe we could get by without 8 until 9 came out, but eventually we'll need the latest license to work with "x" firm or "y" contractor who has already upgraded, and then we'd pay twice as much per seat to upgrade than if we'd just subscribed in the first place. And we wouldn't have access to the x.5 release that corrects all the buggy code from x.0.

Seriously Autodesk's licensing strategies are the most monopolistic of any app out there that I know of. I'd be hard pressed to name a single thing in my workflow that I couldn't still do with max4 -- except open newer files.

Shaun

[Dschaga]

try to export/import with FBX ..or ..and this works suprisingly well if you have no animation, to Lightscape *.LP.

[Dschaga]

Seriously Autodesk's licensing strategies are the most monopolistic of any app out there that I know of. I'd be hard pressed to name a single thing in my workflow that I couldn't still do with max4 -- except open newer files.

This is free market economy ..and YOU have to suffer from it, if don't SWITCH and use alternatives.

The sad point is, that this free market economy is so free, that good and innovative competitors will be bought by the old bull instead forcing him to rethink his behave.

[ShaunDon]

All of our clients and partner companies use Autodesk software, and all our employees are trained on it. The costs of switching go far deeper than throwing out $20-30k in Autodesk software, and our little firm switching horses wouldn't be a blip to AD.

The free market works when there's active competition and viable alternatives -- I know there's other software out there to use, but it would put us in the minority of the industry and make our jobs even more difficult.

I just don't understand how a company that sells $3-4k software can get away with forcing users to upgrade through obsolescence every year, buy out competitors to integrate one token feature then kill the entire software package, and doesn't allow the resale of it's software (a small business with $20k of Autodesk products = no assets) avoids government scrutiny. Someone told me Kinetix and AD were separated over a decade ago to avoid anti-trust suits in Canada. Now we have the meglomaniacle ADME. It just doesn't wash to me.

Shaun

[Dschaga]

I always was wondering how it could happen, that the CG comunity is powerfull enough to run 100s Msg boards and renderchallenges, to exchange knowhow with 1000s of tutorials for free, but ISN'T ABLE to send the one BIG BOLD message to AD to stop this unbehave of forced upgrades through incompatible fileformats ..

We, the users are punished and abused by the company which is only producing the tool, which isn't really worth the money without our creative energy.

sidenote:
I saw presentations of max/betas where it was possible to open the generated files with an old max version and i'm pretty sure it's only a question of hacking the ~40kb viewportmanager.gup ..dunno i'm not a coder, but when we get punished we should do something against it in the same way.

[ShaunDon]

I'm not surprised at all by Autodesk's tactics. The market is saturated and their newest versions for the past few years haven't offered anything to really get excited about. After 8 versions of max alone, it's pretty well feature-packed. There are still numerous quirks and glitches that never seem to get resolved, but we've all learned to live with them.

But to survive as a corporation, AD needs to continuously grow its revenues, and it has to do that by guarranteeing a base revenue stream through its subscription program. But now I'm really starting to attack the capitalist / free market economy, so I'll stop right here.

Shaun

[Paul Oblomov]

Beta version made older max compatible files. With several errors max7 opened b8 files. When it came to release - max7 failed to do that job.