3DSMax

3DSMax is an alternative method of creating models for Glest. It is the only other 3D modelling program available for Glest with a direct G3D export, unfortunatly this exporter is not compatible with more recent versions of 3DS Max such as new than 3DS Max 7, such as 2010 and 2011. Because of its commercial nature, Blender is the dominant program amongst the Glest community. As a result, most 3DS Max users will be required to export to a format that Blender can open, such as MD5, DirectX or 3DS, then import it into Blender to use as a G3D converter.

Exporting
There is an available to export directly to g3d-format, it is included in the official Glest Tools package. It was used by the original Glest Team, but lack of 3DSMax users in the community have caused it to become outdated to the point of which it does not work on current versions of 3DSMax.

For animating in 3DS Max, it is recommended that you use skeletal animation as you can then export to the MD5 format which can be imported into Blender which can then convert to G3D. MD5 is an extremely flexible format for skeletal meshes and works with other 3D applications too. See MD5 for more information.

When importing an MD5 into Blender, be sure to check the model textures, size and rotation before exporting to G3D as normally textures need to be reapplied in Blender before exporting into G3D. You should also take advantage of the separate MD5ANIM animations as you can import one MD5MESH into Blender, texture it, scale it and rotate it; then you can import all MD5ANIMs and apply them to that mesh. This way you don't have import, retexture, resize, etc for every animation instead you only have to do this per mesh.

When exporting a skeletal mesh from 3DS Max into the MD5MESH format, you should make sure that all bones are linked to one master bone, the game Doom 3 by ID Software was the first to use MD5 and the models in this game use a bone called 'origin' which acts as the master parent bone (all bones eventually link to it either direcdtly or through other bones).

When exporting a skeletal aniamtion from 3DS Max into the MD5ANIM format, you must first collapse all aniamtion frames that you are exporting. For example, if you are using IK Solvers, before exporting you must select all bones, go to the Motion tab, then to Trajectories and then Collapse all bones making sure you have set the Start Time, End Time and Samples correctly; once complete you will see your bones have a keyframe for every frame of their animation which makes them safe to export to MD5.

For MD5 import and export tools see MD5.