Saveas Max 9

[Geoffc]

I installed max 2008 and vray 1.5 and opened up a scene and saved it into the latest version. But, now there is some vrayhdri material that crashes the material editor and max altogether, when displayed in the ME. So I tried to open up the scene in my older Max 9 where I know it works, but the file is now in the 2008 format, and I can't find any utility or saveas command to save back in format. Any ideas?

 

Or, is there a way to erase a material out of the ME without displaying it? I opened up the Material Browser, highlighted the ME under "browse from", but can't figure out how to erase that vrayhdri, especially since I dont believe it is still even used in the scene.

 

Thanks!

[jucaro]

Have you tried switching to a different display driver in Max 2008?

[kippu]

yep switching to a different driver will help ...otherwise its merging left for you

[BrianKitts]

I can't find any utility or saveas command to save back in format. Any ideas?

 

Thanks!

 

To answer that question....No, you won't find any utility that does that. Max has never had reverse compatability, it's been joked about before as the autodesk wholly grail, cause we all would love to find one, but it just doesn't exist.

 

So your options are to open a new file with a clean ME and merge in all your objects as mentioned previously, but you'll still be in 2008. Or if you really need to drop back to 9, you would have to export all your objects to a .3ds file and then after importing the file into max9 you'll still have alot of cleanup to do, so it's kind of a pain.

[kippu]

actually there was a script back from 5 ...i used it couple of times from 8 to 7 ...but its not totally perfect ..its a help though

[Dave Buchhofer]

fbx works fairly well nowadays.

[Geoffc]

Well I finally realized that the version I had, materials and all wasn't that big a deal (not worth pursuing further), and since linked with an acad file, I just went ahead and created a clean new 2008 max file and relinked the acad file. I can merge in any necessary elements if needed (matched cameras, etc).

 

I am pretty surprised that there isn't a conversion or saveas function. Not only had acad always supported saving as an earlier format, they even provide a free conversion tool to up or down convert a file called DWG True convert.

 

Anyway, thanks for the replies.

[Hazdaz]

Yea, it's a freakin' joke that AutoDesk doesn't have a SAVE AS command... I really consider it inexcusable and rather pathetic on their part. (but then again, good software is not what AutoDesk does).

 

If in the future you still need to open a newer file in an older version of MAX, use a utility called BFF. It can take quite some time to work, but basically it creates a script to recreate each and every object in your scene, then you run that script on the other computer and it backtracks the process. Pretty cool idea.