I’ve been suffering from insomnia so I decided to finish up some changes to the SMD importer bringing it up to release version 1.0.

Changes in this version from the alpha are fixes to try and handle SMD parsing better, a “pre-parse” option to speed up reading SMDs by skipping data you don’t want and most significantly, support for importing animations.

Nov. 26, 2008 @ 04:18

To say I’m stressed would be an understatement of epic proportions. I seem to have so much going on right now I’m wishing the world had a giant “pause” button I could press now and then just to give myself a chance to catch up with everything I have to do. I’m starting to become a career insomniac and the pay sucks.

Anyway, I’ve managed to scrounge a few hours to look at bugs in the 3DS Max SMD Importer alpha version and I think I’ve nailed the most common one’s that people reported. I’ve also started on support for animation and so far it’s working, I just need to tidy up some code and wrap up some of the user options.

Unfortunately due to my workload I probably won’t be able to get the next update out this week as I hoped but there will be one soon.

Ta-da! So here it is after far to many months of faffing around trying to find time to work on it.

This is an “alpha” release meaning I can’t be 100% sure it’s bug free and it doesn’t contain all the features I’d hope to add to a final version. Most noticeably it doesn’t re-create smoothing groups (it uses vertex normals instead) and currently doesn’t support animation imports. That said, it’s got a couple of nice extra features I added.

I’ve also made a small update to the SMD exporter plug-in to enable it to export vertex normals correctly. This is important if your just importing/exporting from Max without editing.

As usual I welcome feedback and bug reports but remember I can’t fix a bug without a good description and the file that was causing the problem. I have to be able to replicate the problem to solve it.

Thanks to all for your patience and apologies it took so long. Sadly real life and my innate crapness at mathematics is to blame for the delay.

Edit: Oops, put a wrong file in the archive. Fixed it now.