milkshape is perhaps one of the greatest 3d modelling programs to learn how to model. But when people from other platforms try to use it they're used to some of the extra bells and wistles which milkshape doesn't have.
Personally, I never used a 3d modelling program before milkshape, and have never tried modelling anything before it, I dled milkshape and learned how to use it strictly for the purpose of mkaing ships for freelancer, inwhich with almost everyship I learned something new or a better/quicker way to have done it in milkshape. After using milkshape I did try a number of other 3d moddelling programs (lightwave, 3ds max, gmax, maya PLE, autocad, formz, solidworks (god I love university computers in the structural enginneering lab) and cinema 4d). But, interms of just making low poly ships, milkshape is still one of the best, the other programs tend to have 80% of it's material interms of making it easy to deal with high poly models, and not that useful in regards to what you want to do. In milkshape, you make what you want, nothing special. (BTW, for all you who are complaining bout not being able to edit in 3d space, milkshape 2.0 is going to have those capabilities when it's released) another btw, there are a number of tools and plugins which don't come with milkshape which are just circulating on the forum. This includes two different non official update packs for milkshape 1.7.0, so you might wanna look round there for some of those tools. Personally the texture refresh plugin is one of the best things bout milkshape though doesn't come right with it, have to dl it seperately. There are some people who are maxing out there milkshape with over 100 different plugins, so before you start complaining about milkshapes abilites, you should look into what abilities it actually has, only prob though that I admit is a lot of the plugins are smeared across the years of posts on the forum, so you have to do some work to find them all lol.
Personally I learned to model strictly for the purpose of making ships for freelancer, right now I'm learning how to use cinema 4d because I can take nice renders in it, and possibly make some nice animations. (Btw, all you guys who post up pics of your ships, c4d has a free demo version, which while you can't save your work it never stops to work, you CAN still use all the advanced rendering capabilities of it, so no reason to post 'crappy' looking pics, take a good render of it)
But these two programs are perhaps the best two I've used, milkshape for low poly work, and cinema 4d is certainly my favorite out of all the "higher-end" modelling programs. All of the ships I have hosted on my
webspace are made in milkshape with the exception of the newest ship heretic, cause I was transfering it back and forth between milkshape and c4d. conversely the oldest ship, Black_thunder, is the first thing I ever made using a 3dmoddeling program. Kinda fun going back and looking at how the designs and efficiency of the models I made have improved over time.
And just to have a little blab bout the original topic, nope, no cmp exporter for 3ds max, you have to export from max into one of the dozens of formats milkshape can import, then export it to freelancer, But truth of the matter, just not having a export from max to freelancer really doesn't matter much, you can still pretty much competely make your entire model in 3dsmax and do a very simple and fast converstion between the two programs no sweat and no extra work, I think the majority of the people who can't figure out how easy it is to transfer projects between various programs and milkshape, mostlikely have that problem because they never bought or registered milkshape and their demo ran out, hence where the real problem comes in
Thu Apr 01, 2004 11:33 am 
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