I am now going to start writting about other things, such as any problems I encounter during production or any other things that I feel may be useful to people in a similar situation.
Anyway here is the first.
It is probably not used that often anymore since FBX etc, but I recently had the need to export some basic models into 3ds format.
This is something I have done many times before without problem and this was also my first attempt at using 3ds max 2013 for anything other than playing around so I was definitely scratching my head for a bit!
As you may know Max 2013 has been completely changed to unicode which is no mean feat, it does however mean that there appears to be some pretty annoying issues that we are going to stumble upon that are going to take awhile to be solved by product updates etc. I am on Product Update 5 so hopefully this may be fixed in 6 anyway.
If not and you need to use the 3ds export or import functions, keep reading.
It appears that the problems is due to some lines of code being left out of the new translated unicode versions of the 3ds export and 3ds import plugins.
More infomation here
http://blog.ab4d.com/post/2012/08/24/Solution-for-problematic-3ds-files-exported-from-3ds-Max-2013.aspx
To cut a long story short the plugins fail to save the correct texture paths and the import plugin generates some random looking chinese characters instead of loading your texture.
I do not know if these characters mean anything (possibly missing bitmap I guess) if someone does know feel free to let me know.
This will also cause an issue if you are using different material id's or multi/sub object materials as they will get lost on export.
The fix is courtesy of spacefrog from the Area forums who has very nicely re-compiled the Max 2013 3D Studio (*.3ds) Import/Export modules.
You can see the original thread with a download link to the updated modules.
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max--3ds-max-design-2013/max2013-3ds-importexport-modules-fixedrecompiled
***As with anything like this make sure you backup your data and original files before playing around with modified files but I have done this and it works great for me so thank you spacefrog***
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