Just came across this free online file conversion site. Apart from the usual image, video, audio and document conversion there is also a mesh section. Here you can convert over 40 different mesh formats to obj and fbx for free. This includes files from Maya, Max, Cinema4D. Only limitation is that the size of the file for conversion is capped at 50mb. The site is anyconv.com

The idea sounds neat, but let's be extremely untrusting of anything that is free and asks you to blindly upload your files. They're getting and certainly storing your files. You can't prove they've deleted anything. You have no idea what they're actually doing with those files. Maybe German law requires them to be trustworthy. Not sure. I'd like to believe that, but I don't. And neither should you.

The main benefit of a site like this is not in converting files you have made. Why would you as you have the software that was used to create the model and if you needed to pass it on to someone else then you could do so in any number of export formats. This site is useful when you have a model that you have downloaded that is in a format that Blender can't import. There are a number of sites that offer free models for download but they are often in formats like .max or .c4d which Blender can't import. Using this site to convert those models poses no risk to you and results in the opportunity to use a model that you couldn't otherwise have used.

That makes sense.

Hmmm. This looks useful, hopefully it works well.

keppel posted at 10:01PM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410108

The main benefit of a site like this is not in converting files you have made. Why would you as you have the software that was used to create the model and if you needed to pass it on to someone else then you could do so in any number of export formats. This site is useful when you have a model that you have downloaded that is in a format that Blender can't import. There are a number of sites that offer free models for download but they are often in formats like .max or .c4d which Blender can't import. Using this site to convert those models poses no risk to you and results in the opportunity to use a model that you couldn't otherwise have used.

Well, I don't think the .max conversion will work, if it's even legal for them to offer it. The .max extension is a proprietary scene file format for 3dsmax, not a model or object definition. In the same way a .blend file will contain all the scene information, a .max file will contain models, lights, materials, animations, modifiers, and plugins that are tied to the 3dsmax software itself. Texture locations, however, are always relative to the file location. Unlike Blender, .max can not pack textures into the file. I'd be interested to see what it does with a .max conversion. I might try it with one of my own files.

Well, I uploaded one of my own .max files to the site for conversion. I chose the OBJ conversion because I really wanted to see how it would handle that. I had to upload a very small scene file, because they wouldn't accept anything over 50mb. I went with a simple 1 mb file.

The first thing I noticed was that even though I chose the option to convert it to OBJ, it automatically switched to FBX, which makes perfect sense. The .max scene file contains scene information that would be useless to OBJ, but FBX can handle things like cameras and some modifier information.

The conversion process never fully completed though. I let it go on for almost 10 minutes on a 1 mb .max file, but it never finished the conversion and I didn't have time to sit there longer than 10 minutes. In thier list, it does claim to support .max to obj, but like i said, it seems to switch to FBX and then never fully finish the conversion. If anyone out there ever had a successful .max conversion, I'd love to know how that turned out.