PolyTrans

adam

Hey, a co-worker of mine is looking to purchase PolyTrans and was wondering if it's worth the few hundred dollars it costs. He's basically looking to be able to transfer files from Max to Maya successfully without any problems and apparently PolyTrans can do this.

If anyone has insight into this program I'd appreciate it. Thank you!

MoP

Well, first of all, what sort of files does he want to transfer? Entire scenes with lights, cameras, rigging and animation?
It might be worth looking into FBX exporter/importers first, they handle geometry and bones (I think)... and are free.

adam

Entire scenes, lights, rigging, animation - the works.

MoP

Oh, right... yeah, I guess it'd have to be that, then. The only other one I can think of is Deep Exploration, but I'm not sure how much that costs, or how much in the way of max/maya scenes it supports.

www.righthemisphere.com to check it out though.

thomasp

what about demo-ing it first?

i do not believe at all that polytrans handles whatever you throw at it. i used to use it way back to transfer between max and softimage 3d and it was as limited as any other scene translator, meaning that some things just could not be transferred.

if you're only dealing with baked down geometry, skeletal animation, standard skinning and materials, then yes, it may work (however - would that be any different from FBX then?).

anything tricky, anything that depends on advanced usage of modifiers, controllers, etc - nah! max doesn't even save the whole scene baked down into it's files if you're using modifiers - it seems to re-generate the scene according to the stack at load time instead.

one can cleary see this when loading a .max file into a viewer like 3d exploration - if a mesh's modifier stack consists of the initial primitive and all sorts of modifiers on top of it then all your viewer will see is the primitive.

EarthQuake

i think fbx would be your best choice regardless of what you're doing, i've used polytrans a year or two ago and it wasnt that good. FBX is great tho

adam

EQ can you go more in depth as to why PolyTrans was no good? And why FBX is a good choice to go?

We'd basically like to have as little a problem as possible when going from Max to Maya or vice-versa. Thanks man

EarthQuake

I just remember shoddy converting, half-flipped models, only tris, ect... Tho it might be a lot better now.