Hi
When we import an animation from Max9, the character comes into unity face down, or face up can anyone help.
Thx
Dex
Tell him to cut down on the drinking.
You would have to re-orient the model in Max to correct for it. This can happen with importing from some apps as they have their coordinate systems messed up/non-standard. At least for their exporters.
-Jeremy
Or you can put the character as the child of an empty transform, and use that transform fr your interactions.
Odd - My stuff seems to work better if I heavily marinate everything in rum.
As an avid Max user, I can tell you that the problem is that while in Max Y is forward and Z is up, it’s the exact opposite in Unity.
The solution is to rotate your model so that its relative ‘up’ is along the Y axis in Max, while it’s forward is along max’s Z axis - basically you want it to be looking at you if you’re looking at the object in the ‘Top’ Viewport.
If marinating yourself in rum is also included, then I see your point.
I don’t want to find out later that I tried to make a game by drawing on the monitor with a sharpie, so I will refrain from that method for now.
-Jeremy
nothing ventured, nothing gained… 
I also use Max9 for animation and have seen but gotten around this problem. I am using the Biped for the skeleton with and without attached extra bones. The biped should be facing down when viewed from the top view as it does if you create it from the front view.
I’m assuming that you are exporting to .FBX format, so I’d make sure you have the latest fbx plugin (200611_1) from autodesk’s site and under the conversion section of the FBX export dialog set it to “convert animation” and “Y” for the world up axis.
As a caveat, this only works if you’re exporting the mesh and the animation together in one file. If you export the rigged mesh as a file and the animation/biped without the mesh as animation files then it won’t work right. If you’re using a custom bones rig and not biped, then the same things should apply of it working when exported with rigged mesh and animation as a file, but not if done seperately.
As to the axis discrepancy, it’s more than just Y and Z being opposite. Looking from a top-down view, in Max +X is east, +Y is north, and +Z is up towards you, but in Maya and Unity +X is west, +Y is up towards you, and +Z is south. From Max to Maya or Unity that means that your X value changes sign, your Y value changes sign, and your Y and Z values are swapped. Sorry, but to me that’s just weird.
If you happen to also be using Maya, I know of another technique that will let you seperate the mesh from the animation and still work. Hope that helps some.
Thank you for posting all of this. I stopped using Max, my preferred 3D app, out of frustration with trying to nail down the coordinate changes. My PC and Mac are across the house from each other and I got sick of running back and forth trying to export something, only to see that upon importing into Unity, the model was still wrong, but in completely new ways each time. This will really come in handy the next time I have to go back to Max for something.