Collaborating with 3DSMax artist when I don't have 3DSMax

Hey all, I have a dumb n00b question. :D We are 2 scripters and a 3D artist collaborating on a Unity project. We are all new to Unity and are having a very hard time setting up an environment for exchanging files. Our artist is creating his models in 3DS Max and then importing them into Unity. It works fine for him, but if he sends us his files, although they show up as assets in Unity we cannot actually see the models. Selecting the asset just selects a gray box.

We are just using the free version of Unity for now, so we can't use the Asset Server or any real version control. We don't anticipate a lot of conflicts with such a small team anyway, though. Can someone give us step by step instructions as to how to make this work? Thanks.

Unity needs 3DSMax installed on the same machine as Unity to be able to read the .max files. The easiest work around is to have your artist export the models to .fbx manually as that is what Unity does in the end anyway.

Cheers,

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I suggest to manually export FBX files, that solves a lot of problems.