Hello,

I am considering purchasing either maya, max, lightwave or xsi for level and model development to be used with 3dgs7.

In your opinion, which one works the most seamlessly with wed and med?

Are there any little bugs i should be aware of? Do they all have plugins for export?

I would really appreciate and honest opinon on what 3rd part tools work best with gs.

Any info will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

you can also use Blender. Its for free and Ventilator writes a plugin where you can export .mdl files.

none of the tools works seamless in terms of "all you do in 3d suite x will be ported to MED". all modelers you mentioned support exporting to fbx. so geometry will always be ported. lightwave fbx has known issues with bones (will be null-object related), but you can purchase a "native" mdl exporter from GreenBriar, cinema4d fbx is know to be non-autodesk compliant and may cause problems with other applications, such as 3ds max. xsi is a rather safe choice for fbx, thanks to crosswalk, it supports many other export formats. do not trust the max and maya mdl exporters on the conitec download page, they are outdated. fbx is the way to go here, too.

however, special and editor-specific settings like materials, multi-uv-setups and procedural textures along with nurbs, patches, splines etc. will always cause you some headache and will force you to find you own workarounds. there is no such thing as a 100% carefree solution.

sometimes it blows up the mesh(removing some frames fixes sometimes) but max fbx export->med fbx import works fine 90%.

Speaking personally, I am a 3DMax user, have been for some time. I use 7 at home and yes I bought it Frankly best purchase I ever made. Still £1500+ was a lot of notes. I use 9 at work which is fantastic, just wish I could bring it home

I use the .SCE export, as this works best for our pipeline, and supports materials which is a must Although for animated models we are looking at .X

Unless you are an experienced modeler I would however avoid any of the expensive packages such as Max, most likely looking towards Blender. Some people have great success with MED so don't count that out just yet

Have a look around, download a few demos, find an app that suits your style. Lots of people use Maya, but I can't stand it... different strokes for different folks.

Just dont jump in and buy Max or Maya and expect beautiful models

Hope that's helpful at least