Anyone know of a translator to read Ray Dream Studio (rds) files? I can convert fom most any other format, but no Translator I have will read a rds file. Ultimatly I need to move it into Max, but any other round-a-bout way is fine if it does it!

You could get a copy of RDS 5.5 (they're cheap if you can find them) and use it to translate to .3ds, .obj, dxf or whatever. Carrara can also read .rds files, but it's not as cheap. Hope this helps.

Thanks for that info...didn't know what formats RayDream would save in...a good way if nothing else comes up.

RayDream saves in / exports to all major formats. By the way, if you just want to open rds files (one wonders why or how you do have rds-files at hand, but no copy of RayDream, but that's probably perfectly explainable) you could go for the end-of-life offer for Carrara 1.1 eovia has on their site. But as a lot of program-specific formats (quiz question: which program saves .t3d files?) are not stored with information other apps can handle. If this really is a problem, and you can't find someone around with RDS or Carrara, contact me, maybe I can do some translations on a rainy tuesday afternoon and send them by email (or on cd).

One thing to keep in mind is the when RDS exports I've found it creates HUGE files, ten or more times as large as the original. All the efficiencies of master objects are lost and the mathematical definitions of Free Form objects is gone when these are converted to meshes.