I have a major project which involves rendering a car i've designed in a scene. i'd really like a cad model of a city (melbourne, australia specifically) in the background of this rendering, and would love to place the car right in the city and have the buildings reflecting off the car etc-and i'll add extra road side details etc in max to get it looking more realistic where needed.I have melbourne scenery for i bought ages ago for flight sim 98 (quite old i know, and have seen how good the maps are now with things like FTX blue), my question is, is there a way i can import this cad data into 3dsmax? I have found many tutorials for going the opposite direction (3dsmax to flight sim). And other programs which look like they open the data for you to add more detail to it. but i am unsure of the entire process i need to do to open the files in max, and am getting more and more confused!Even if it is just the 3d data without any materials it would be of use to me, and save me some time. Any help would be greatly appreshiated-as have spent 3 hours trying to find info on how to do it!thanks, Evan

Hello Evan,It is not very clear what you mean. If your "cad" files are from AutoCAD, or in dxf format, then you should be able to simply import them into 3D Studio Max.However, if you want to convert old scenery to MDL format, then import it to 3DS Max, you will probably have a difficult job ahead of you. Arno Gerretsen has a tool to convert old-style APIs to MDL and, I think, also into 3DSMax format. However, very old objects will be difficult, probably impossible, to convert. You can give it a try, but perhaps the best solution is just to make the scenery over again.Best regards.Luis

sorry for being vague, and thanks for your help so far. i'm mainly used to dealing with stp and stl files - both of which contain 3d surface or mesh data which is fairly universally converted between programs - and before today was unfamilar with anything to do with flight sim scene modifyingIdeally i would like to purchase ftx au blue and import it as a scene into 3dsmax. There is a free trial on their website (fullterrain.com) so i am currently trying to play around with that and get the data into 3dsMax.I also have an old melbourne scenery BGL file which is no where near as detailed, but i could settle for using that instead if it is easier.It seems as though the data from fullterrain is also stored in multiple BGL files?

The scenery you mention is compiled into bgl format - this is a catch-all wrapper for very different types of data and can contain objects, navigational data, airport reference information, terrain mesh, and a certain number of other types of "scenery" including A.I. traffic!It can be difficult, and in some cases, impossible to extract some of those data types from the bgl, and the ones you want, that is, the objects, will then be available in their compiled MDL format, which is the export type for 3DS Max, and gMAX, when using the FS X game pack. Extracting the x format from the MDL might be possible, but I do not remember off-hand any tool that would do so.I suppose that if you are working with JetStream then you could export its models to 3DS Max format. But, taking compiled models and de-compiling is difficult in all cases.Perhaps you could try contacting the authors of the scenery that interests you and see if they are willing to provide you the project files that you could open directly in 3DS Max.Best regards.Luis

Hi,I would for sure try to contact the authors first to see if they want to help you. Or at least to ask permission to use their work in that way.With my ModelConverterX tool (mentioned before already), you can import scenery objects from FSX and FS2004 MDL format and from SCASM files. The tool also allows you to export to 3DS format, which you can import in 3DS Max.

Thanks Luis and Arno, I will try contacting the developers to see if they are willing to provide me with the models in a more suitable file formatI will also give ModelConverterX a try when the site is back up for downloading it. I tried a couple of the bgl to xml convertors from there earlier as max can read xml, although this doesn't seem to be the correct format as they end up as 1-3kb text files!

I tried a couple of the bgl to xml convertors from there earlier as max can read xml, although this doesn't seem to be the correct format as they end up as 1-3kb text files!

XML files are text files.

XML, by design, is a lot of things to a lot of different people, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3Dbut, unfortunately, Evan, the models for Flight Simulator are not exported in xml format.Best regards.Luis