max format and Unity compatibility

Unity Engine
1

To upgrade from Max 2008–>Max 2010 is about $1700, so I’m guessing it will cost me about $2500 to upgrade. I have 3DS Max 9 and only use it for game development, so don’t need all the rendering power. I only use it to model with for games as I like the interface and workflow better than TrueSpace, Blender, or Lightwave. I haven’t tried Maya.

I have Max 7 and Max 9. I can’t make a model in Max 9 and open it with Max 7. I understand .max files are like that. You can only open previous versions not versions above yours.

So here’s my question, if there are so many versions of .max, then does Unity keep up with all those versions and how far back is Unity going to keep up with the 3DS Max versions?

Would it be necessary for me to upgrade, because I like being able to make changes in my models in Max and have them automatically update in Unity. Or will Unity be able to work with any version of Max, even if you go up to Unity 3.0, 4.0, etc?

2

Unity doesn’t read .max files, it open Max in the background and makes it export to .fbx.

–Eric

3

I guess that means it loads whatever .max file type you have installed. I prefer .FBX over .max because the whole runtime .max conversion process in unity can be very slow.

4

unity doesn’t run .max files?? does it compile them as fbx on build then?

5

Not to repeat myself, but…“Unity doesn’t read .max files, it opens Max in the background and makes it export to .fbx.” Same with Blender, Cheetah, etc.

–Eric

6

This is why you need to have Max or Maya installed to use the .max or .ma/.mb files directly in Unity. You will need the version of Max or Maya that matches your files.

This is one of the many reasons I prefer direct to FBX as well.