3DS Max to ThreeJS Workflow

Getting a fully-textured model into three.js from 3DS Max is not particularly easy when you first get started. The basic process involves exporting to a commonly used format that has a corresponding loader. Often, you’ll want to export lights and cameras in addition to your model, so you may try exporting to Collada (DAE) format. However, as of r70, the DAE importer for three.js is not particularly stable. I had the most luck exporting to OBJ, which is a much simpler format. In particular, I followed these steps:

  • Export to OBJ and MTL.
  • Use OBJMTL loader.
  • Your scene will be placed into the three scene as a THREE.Group.
  • The 3DS Max 2015 OBJ exporter does not use “o myobjname” tags in the resulting OBJ file. Thus, your models will not have a 1-to-1 correspondence with THREE.Object3D instances in the scene. Instead, the exporter uses a comment with the format # Object ObjectName. You can either edit the OBJ to have the o tag or edit the loader to recognize this particular comment. It is important to have your objects properly nested if you want to do picking easily.

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