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Script

BFF - Bobo's File Format

By Borislav Petrov · 2006-10-21

Version
0.4.2
Version requirement
5; 4; 3
Date updated
2003-09-24
Votes
28
Homepage
http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/darkmoon/bff/
Download
Download
Description

BFF - Bobo's File Format - formerly known as Back From Five - is a MAXScript based object exporter under development.
It lets you transfer basic object information between different versions of 3ds max using a MAXScript intermediate format.

No importer is required!

The script was developed mainly to move data from 3ds max 5 back to 3D Studio MAX R3.1 in a game development pipeline. Still - it supports large data sets. It has been successfully tested with objects over 800.000 faces and with large number of objects (1000+) and should work with even bigger assets.

Additional Info

WHY NOT USE ONE OF THE EXISTING EXPORTERS?

* .OBJ does not translate all max-specific properties
* .ASE can only export - the unsupported importer is not available for all Max versions
* .3DS is the main transfer data format in the max world - but
-- 3DS does not preserve UV coordinates completely (supports only one TVertex per Mesh Vertex - one Texture Channel) - BFF supports all 100 Channels with multiple TVertices per Vertex.
-- 3DS has a data limit of 64K faces per object. BFF supports arbitrary object size.
-- 3DS does not preserve max procedural maps. BFF supports the complete max material tree.
-- 3DS supports meshes only. BFF supports EditableSplines and procedural primitives - has (limited) modifier stack support and can be extended to support Patches - NURBS etc.

WHAT IS NEW IN THE LATEST VERSION?
The following improvements have been made to BFF:

* Scene format has been split into Scene and Object .ms files. This lets you quickly disable the loading of single objects by remarking single lines from the main file and enables the import of very large scenes with thousands of objects which used to cause MAXScript memory problems in previous versions.

* The directory structure has been changed to a more logical hierarchy.

* Support for Material Editor materials export has been added and enabled by default.

* ZIP Archive support has been added. Now you can optionally archive all files of an exported scene to a single ZIP file to move to another machine.

* Editable Poly support has been enabled through Editable Mesh conversion on import. This means that the data will be exported in the Editable Mesh format and a conversion to Editable Poly class will be attempted when the scene is being imported. If the target platform supports Editable Poly objects (3ds max 4 - 5 and 6 do) - the object will end up as EPoly. If it does not support such objects (3ds max 2.5 and 3 do not) - the object will end up as Editable Mesh as in older BFF versions.

Make sure to visit the BFF page for more details!

Tags: I/O

Comments (2)

Univerpix Studio · 2011-06-10

This is an awesome script. Congratulation. You saved me a lot of time. I hate exporting to obj or fbx, and than importing to an older max, and correcting the materials and a lot of things...

But in the max2012 it not works

Nik · 2013-02-13

:)but it would be

I would like to convert scenes in the 2009

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