MAX - FBX Export Gotchas!

This might not be too useful for anyone, but I’ve just spent a little bit of time looking in to this and finding nothing worked in Max 2016. Obviously not immediately vfx, but if you are trying to export any destruction/simulation animations and need to resample keys… this is a core thing.

I’ve done this before in earlier versions so it was confusing why it no longer works. So just in case this helps anyone now or in the future, here’s what I’ve found:

I was looking at automating animation export through scripts as with 2016, “Resample All” is turned off by default and settings are not persistant…

The recommended “FBXImporterSetParam” functions to access the export dialog settings completely don’t work. Don’t even try to use them.

Saving presets doesn’t seem to work.

So, it seems that 3ds Max 2017 wants to save the presets in:
…\Documents\3dsMax\FBX\3dsMax2017_X64\Presets\2017.0.1\export
and it wants to load presets from:
…\Documents\3dsMax\FBX\3dsMax2017_X64\Presets\export

(This seems to be true)

The only way I found to change the default behaviours (can’t load presets, settings aren’t persistent, max won’t load presetfiles) is to modify the main presets here:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2017\plugcfg\FBX\presets\export\Autodesk Media & Entertainment.fbxexportpreset

You may need to work around to get permissions to edit it; they are just XML files so are fairly readable.

Hope this saves someone some time!

Thanks! I’m diving into this part of fx now, so I’m sure this will be exceptionally useful. Thanks again!

np, not sure when the export pipeline got broken like this, I can’t remember having issues in 2015.

BTW I think the version I was testing was 2017, not 2016 as in the post. If you get to it and it’s all fine, that might be why!

I found rebake all to be such a necessity, it’s crazy it just keeps getting ignored.