Changelog

🆕 Two conversion paths: A and B - Path A ("Blender 5.1 and older") gives a file that opens in any Blender from 4.2 up. Path B ("Blender 5.2 and newer") is built natively in Blender 5.2 and uses its new shader features: Thin Wall glass, Volume Coefficients, DirectX normal-map convention. A path-B file cannot be opened in Blender 4.2 — that is a Blender limitation — so you pick the path yourself in the 3ds Max plugin or in the Blender add-on. Every path-B branch was measured against path A before being enabled; path A itself did not change. 💡 IES profiles travel with the scene - A light with an IES profile used to arrive as a plain omnidirectional light: the profile was only a path on the author's machine. It is now embedded in the result, and its brightness is normalised the way Corona treats it — Corona uses the profile as a shape and ignores absolute candelas, while Cycles reads them literally; without normalisation lights could be off by four orders of magnitude. - VRayIES lights and native 3ds Max photometric lights, which were not exported at all, are exported now. 🌍 Scene background and cameras - The Environment colour or environment map (HDRI/EXR) from 3ds Max arrives as the Blender world. The orientation of the spherical mapping was measured against Corona renders and matched. - Cameras with Automatic Vertical Tilt Correction (Corona, Physical, V-Ray Physical) no longer arrive with converging verticals: the law was measured from renders and is rebuilt exactly through the field of view and lens shift. Manual vertical shift is transferred too. 🎨 Glass and refraction - Light through glass now reaches the floor. Shadows under glass were almost black (about 3 % of the light against 95 % in Corona). Corona lets shadow rays pass refractive surfaces, tinted but not bent — the boundary law was measured and is reproduced exactly, including absorption inside thick glass. - Thin-walled glass (car windows, headlights) is no longer dark grey and no longer bends the view: the default grey absorption swatch was being taken as the glass colour. Measured: absorption plays no role in thin glass and the ray is not bent. Light from inside — a lit car interior — now exits through the glass. - Partial refraction no longer makes glass opaque: a material with Refraction below 100 % and Diffuse Level 0 came out as white, nearly opaque glass. The law for thin and thick glass was measured; the diffuse and refractive lobes are now built separately with the measured weights. - Glass modelled as a single-sided surface no longer smears everything behind it: such materials get a straight-ray path automatically at import, while closed objects (glasses, bottles, vases) keep true refraction. On the test scene the difference to Corona dropped 4–4.6×. 🎨 Materials - V-Ray car paint keeps its body colour: the coat is a plain mix, not a Fresnel layer, and reflection is tinted by the base colour — both measured from V-Ray renders. Bodies that came out lighter and washed-out now match. - Scattering volumes (juice, milk, wax) no longer arrive black — Cycles has zero volume bounces by default; the import now raises the scene setting when a scattering material is present. 🖼️ Geometry - Mesh pivots are preserved: the object origin landed on the start of the geometry instead of the 3ds Max pivot (offsets up to 1.5 m on a car). The Blender importer folds the geometric offset into the object transform; it is now undone exactly — worst vertex deviation 0.0002 mm. 🛠️ Stability and speed - Node layout no longer stalls on heavy scenes: shared node groups were re-laid-out for every material. Import of a 40-object scene went from 67 s to 2.3 s; the resulting graph is identical. - A hung 3ds Max no longer blocks a job forever: on timeout the whole process tree is terminated and the job reports an error instead of staying in "processing". - Worker hardening against untrusted archives; improved robustness of the queue.

🆕 Conversion path A / B - Two radio buttons in the dialog: A — "Blender 5.1 and older", B — "Blender 5.2 and newer". The choice is remembered. A path-B file does not open in Blender 4.2, so pick the path matching the Blender you import into. 💡 Lights and IES - IES profiles are exported by content: the file is read and embedded into the job, so it no longer has to exist on the machine that imports the result. VRayIES lights and native 3ds Max photometric lights (Free/Target Light) are exported now. 🎥 Cameras and background - Camera tilt-shift is exported: Automatic Vertical Tilt Correction, vertical/horizontal tilt and shift for Corona, Physical and V-Ray Physical cameras. - The scene background is exported: Environment colour and environment map (including Corona's own background override); the HDRI/EXR file is collected with the textures. 🛠️ Fixes - Garbled characters ("—") in plugin messages and in the Plugin Manager name are fixed. - The conversion-path control is reliable in 3ds Max 2024 (the drop-down showed empty there; replaced with radio buttons).

🆕 Conversion path in the archive upload dialog - Each time the dialog opens, the path (A / B) is preset from the version of the running Blender: B in 5.2+, otherwise A. The job list shows which path a job was built for, and importing a path-B file into a Blender older than 5.2 is refused before download with a clear reason. 🆕 Smoothing is your choice before import - New "Smoothing" option in Import options: Blender (default) removes the custom normals and sharp edges written by 3ds Max, so meshes arrive with plain smooth shading; 3ds Max keeps the author's smoothing exactly as exported. No "Smooth by Angle" modifier is added either way. Both variants come from the same conversion — re-import to switch, no conversion is spent. - The Import options box folds away; its header shows the current values (placement, smoothing, asset folder), so the panel stays short. 🛑 Cancel a running import - A ✕ on the "Import in progress" bar stops the download of the result. Nothing is added to the scene and the conversion stays on the server. (Cancelling an archive upload has been there for a while — same ✕ on its bar.) 💡 IES and background - Photometric profiles delivered with the job are applied. If a profile did not travel, the add-on looks for it in the job assets, the Exchange folder or your own IES library (set in the add-on preferences). - The world from 3ds Max is imported and becomes the scene world when the scene has none or only Blender's untouched default; your own world is never replaced. 🖼️ Geometry and materials - Pivots preserved: object origins match the 3ds Max pivots exactly. - Glass on open shells gets the straight-ray path automatically; closed glass objects keep refraction. - Scattering volumes (juice, milk, wax) are visible: the scene's volume bounces are raised when such materials are imported. 🛠️ Fixes - Import no longer fails in Blender 5.x when animation stripping is turned off. - Faster import of heavy scenes (node layout no longer re-runs per material).

🆕 Website - User manual at /manual: a step-by-step guide from sign-up to a finished asset in Blender — dashboard and token, plugin and add-on installation, three ways to send a scene, getting the result, plans and troubleshooting, with a video walkthrough at the top. - Roadmap updated with the next four quarters: server infrastructure and faster data exchange, reverse conversion Blender → 3ds Max with a choice of Corona or V-Ray, simple object animation, Unreal Engine, Unity 3D. - Two new pages: the Lab (a blind test "which is 3ds Max and which is Cycles", a material broken down node by node, the pipeline in four steps, the monthly log and a published list of what still breaks) and "What people say" (beta-tester numbers, the bugs they found before we did, quotes). - The changelog page caught up with August: ten releases across the three components, in both languages. - The "Before / After" pair on the front page is a real conversion run, captioned with the renderers. 📦 Uploads - Archive format is detected by content, not by extension: a valid ZIP named .rar is no longer rejected as "unsupported format". - Upload limit for archives raised to 3 GB, and an oversized archive is refused immediately with a message instead of failing mid-transfer. - The server carries the conversion path (A / B) chosen in the plugin or add-on through to the worker. 🔒 Security - HTTPS is enforced end-to-end, with HSTS and Content-Security-Policy headers.

🆕 Splines and cameras - Renderable splines are baked into meshes during conversion, so they arrive in Blender as geometry. - The camera of the converted scene reaches the Blender side together with the materials. 🌍 Names in any alphabet - Scene and job names written in Cyrillic are preserved end to end — in the dashboard, in the plugin, in the addon and in the files you download.

🆕 A job list you can work from - Jobs are split into Not imported and Imported, and the addon remembers which ones already went into this scene, so you can see at a glance what is left to bring in. - The cross next to a job deletes it on the server, not only in the panel. - A ready job can be imported as a .nodeflow package — one file with materials and assets together. 🎛️ Import options - Choose where the import lands: in its original position or at the 3D cursor, as a set and into its own collection. - The import can be marked as a Blender asset, with a preview built for the asset browser, and given your own folder and tags. - Interface and hints are in English throughout. 📊 Balance - The panel shows how many conversions you have left instead of a credit figure, matching the dashboard and the 3ds Max plugin. - Without a token the panel offers a button that opens the settings, instead of a Refresh that could not work. 🎥 Cameras - A camera converted from the scene now reaches the Blender scene on import. 🛠️ Stability - Import no longer appears to hang on "Appending materials" on heavy scenes.

🆕 Renderable splines - A spline marked renderable in 3ds Max now travels to Blender as a mesh, instead of being left behind as an object Blender had nothing to show for. 🛠️ Material names - Names of materials are restored reliably, so materials that happened to share a name in the scene stay distinct after conversion. 🌍 Cyrillic names - A scene named in Russian is no longer cut short: the name you gave the scene is the name you see in the job list. 🎛️ Panel - The plugin panel shows how many conversions you have left rather than a credit figure, matching what the dashboard and the Blender addon show.

🖼️ V-Ray textures land correctly - Texture offset for V-Ray maps was not built at all: the law was measured against a live 3ds Max, and a map that used to be lost before assembly now arrives. - Slots of a VRayMultiSubTex are no longer handed out in a rotation that had nothing to do with the scene. - Bump height is matched to the object's UV layout, so relief depth no longer depends on how the model happens to be unwrapped. 🛠️ Materials with the same name - Objects whose materials shared a name used to receive the material of the first object — a table setting could come out as metal. Each object now keeps its own.

🆕 V-Ray scenes are converted - V-Ray materials are read directly: the slot contract is fixed, IOR is taken from its own field, metal is recognised by a disabled Fresnel, and VRayDirt and glass glossiness arrive as they should. - V-Ray light sources are exported for the first time — before this they were not exported at all. - V-Ray bitmaps are now collected with the scene. A V-Ray scene used to reach conversion with no textures at all, because the texture collector did not recognise that map type. 🎥 Cameras - The scene camera is exported and rebuilt on the Blender side with its main parameters, so the view you set up in 3ds Max is there when the scene opens. 💡 Lights - Mirrored light objects no longer lose their direction, and target lights keep their roll.

🎨 Reflection now follows Corona's own law - Corona never reflects more than a fixed maximum head-on, however high the refractive index goes. Blender has no such limit, so materials with an unusually high IOR came out with reflections up to 2.7× too bright. Both the numeric field and a map plugged into that slot now follow the measured law, which matches live renders to within 0.001 of a grey level across the whole range. 🖼️ Coat maps are no longer dropped - A texture in the Clearcoat roughness or Clearcoat IOR slot was silently ignored, so a coat that should vary across the surface came through perfectly glossy everywhere. Both slots are now connected, and a glossiness-mode map is inverted the same way it already was for the base layer.

🎨 The Color Map curve of the Output rollout now travels with the map - A map whose Output → Enable Color Map curve is drawn used to reach Blender without that curve: only the checkbox was exported, never the shape. Artists use the curve to turn one baked texture into several different maps — feeding it into IOR, roughness or coat slots with a different response each time — so losing it changed the material completely. - The effect was at its worst in the IOR slot. Without the curve the raw texture arrives there as values between 0 and 1, and a refractive index below one reflects almost everything, so dark areas turned into mirrors. - The curve is now read from the map itself and rebuilt in Blender, including values outside the 0..1 range, the per-channel RGB mode and curves that dip below zero. Where the curve is left linear nothing is written and nothing changes.

🖼️ Tiling is read per axis - The Tile checkbox was only read for the U axis, so a map told not to repeat along V was multiplied across the whole surface anyway. Both axes are now read: where 3ds Max shows nothing beyond the edge of a non-repeating map, Blender shows nothing too. If the two axes disagree, Blender's texture node cannot express that, so the non-repeating one wins and the difference is named in the log rather than applied silently. 🛠️ Objects whose material used to arrive empty now get it - Some materials — a Blend material is the clearest case — converted correctly and still ended up nowhere: 3ds Max writes such a material into the FBX but does not attach it to the mesh, so the object reached Blender with no material slot at all. - The converter now records which material belongs to which object, so the link survives even when the FBX does not carry it. This works for any material 3ds Max fails to attach, not only Blend.

🎨 Corona Mix keeps its blend mode - A Corona Mix map used to be converted as a plain mix whatever Mix Operation said: set it to Multiply in 3ds Max and Blender still showed a plain blend. - Every blend mode was measured against a live 3ds Max, colour by colour, and now arrives correctly: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Darken, Lighten, Normal, Difference, Screen, Overlay, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Soft Light, Hard Light. Three modes Blender has no direct equivalent for (Linear Burn, Pin Light, Hard Mix) are named in the log instead of being silently replaced by something similar. - Layer multipliers and constant colours of the map now travel too — they used to be dropped entirely. 🖼️ Textures no longer land in the wrong place - A texture with an Offset set in its Coordinates rollout could reach Blender without it, so the pattern sat somewhere else. It showed up most clearly on masks of layered materials. - The same fault lost the centring of a scaled tile, so a texture with Tiling other than 1 could shift even at zero Offset. - Placement is now computed from the map's own settings, and the whole formula — offset, tiling and W rotation together — was measured against a live 3ds Max rather than assumed. 🛠️ Geometry baking - The option is renamed to Bake Geometry (Ungroup → Reset XForm → Editable Poly), which is what it actually does, and it no longer freezes 3ds Max or damages the scene it is run on.

🛠️ Materials that never arrived - When 3ds Max writes a material into the FBX without attaching it to the mesh, the object used to reach Blender with no material slot and the addon had nothing to replace. The addon now assigns such a material directly, using the link recorded during conversion. - Multi/Sub-Object materials keep their slot numbering, and two materials with the same name are no longer mixed up.

🆕 Conversion without 3ds Max (cloud jobs) - Full new pipeline: you upload a scene archive (.zip / .rar / .7z) with the .max file and textures — the service unpacks it, opens the scene in 3ds Max on our side, converts the materials and returns both the material file and a ready assets package (FBX + textures). No 3ds Max on your machine required. - Multi-gigabyte archives are supported end-to-end (streamed upload and download). 🎯 Scene handling - Smarter scene pick when an archive contains several .max files. 🛠️ Stability - Cloud jobs no longer hang on own warning dialog. Warnings are now answered automatically and the conversion continues. - Real error messages instead of silent timeouts. When a scene fails to open or convert, the actual reason is captured and reported on the job, and the complete log of all conversion phases is attached to the result. - More reliable delivery of finished results back to your dashboard. - Conversions run in parallel and can be spread over several machines, so heavy scenes no longer block the queue.

🛠️ Stability - Export from 3ds Max 2027 fixed. Under a non-English system locale (e.g. Russian) numbers were written with commas, which made the exported data invalid and the server rejected the job. Export is now locale-independent — 2027 works. - The plugin no longer reports a false "Done OK". It now checks the server's actual answer: if a job is rejected, you get an explicit error with the reason instead of a success message with nothing appearing in your dashboard. - Clearer messages for an invalid token and for connection problems. 🎛️ Interface - Animated progress indicator through every export step (vertex-colour baking, FBX export, texture collection, upload) — it's now visible that work is going on, not frozen. - Balance refresh runs in the background — the panel stays responsive while the balance is being fetched, with its own spinner. - Renamed to NodeFlow Platform across the panel, dialogs and logo. - Refreshed builds for 3ds Max 2022–2027.

🆕 Work without 3ds Max - The addon now downloads geometry and textures in addition to materials and assembles the scene on your machine — no 3ds Max and no Exchange folder needed. - New "Upload Archive (no 3ds Max)" button — send a .zip / .rar / .7z scene archive straight from Blender, without visiting the website. - New Result Folder setting for cloud jobs (where downloaded geometry and textures are unpacked). 🎛️ Interface - Progress bars for download and upload — Blender no longer freezes on heavy assets, the transfer runs in the background and can be watched. - "Import All Data" button and Cloud / Local badges — you can tell a cloud job from a plugin job and see what exactly will be loaded, plus the object count. - The job list shows the job name instead of the long id (no more duplicated date). - Balance and job-list refresh moved to the background — no more UI stalls. - Interface fully in English; renamed to NodeFlow Platform. 🔒 Security - All requests moved to https — the token no longer travels in cleartext. Dashboard link for getting the token fixed. 🛠️ Stability - Fixed addon installation. The 3.5.0 build was rejected by Blender with a manifest error and could not be installed at all (description over Blender's 64-character limit). Download 3.5.1 and install as usual.

🆕 New - Gradient Ramp — full support for the Max Gradient Ramp node (mapped to Blender ColorRamp); fixed a name mismatch where it used to fall back to a gray placeholder. 🎨 Materials & Color - Correct linear color (gamma 2.2) - Composite layers — Hard Light blend now computed correctly in linear space (per-channel multiply/screen); blend_mode=12 now uses proper MULTIPLY. - Volume Absorption — unified handling that also works on metals (previously skipped), and now respects a texture in the "Absorb. color" slot, not just a static color. - Color Correction — fixed the Saturation formula for Advanced lightness mode, added vertex color correction - Mix / MultiMap — Mix RGB now distinguishes two different Max nodes that were previously collapsed together - Legacy PBR metals — a plain texture in Diffuse color now connects correctly to Base Color. - sRGB vs Non-Color — corrected color-space assignment across several slots. 🖼️ Textures & Mapping - Real-World Map Size — reads and applies Real World Scale. - Crop/Place — cropped bitmaps now tile the crop rectangle (not the whole file) via a WRAP node; fixed vertical (V) inversion; rotation now pivots around the tile center as in 3ds Max. - Tiling / texture coordinates — symmetric tiling-centering formula; Mirror Tile now exported for the standard Bitmaptexture; general texture-coordinate fixes. - Normal / Bump — Normal Map strength now matches 3ds Max (strength ÷ 3); Non-Color forced on all manually-built Normal Map nodes; additional bump normal handling, default additional bump 0.5. - Invert — Invert available in the Output node. 🛠️ Stability & Import - Unique material names — distinct materials that share a name (different node IDs) now get a unique name plus a warning, so they no longer clash on import. - Server — queue handling correction, improved logging. - Removed obsolete .ms files.

The 3ds Max plugin moved to the new build (replaces the previous tree). Version bumped to 2.2. 🆕 New New export source tree. Gradient Ramp export — the Gradient Ramp node is now serialized to JSON. 🖼️ Textures & Mapping Real-World Map Size — reads and exports Real World Scale for bitmaps. Mirror Tile — Mirror Tile flag now exported for the standard Bitmaptexture. Texture coordinates — tiling/offset export tweaks. 🎨 Materials & Color Color Correction without input map — exports the node's own color instead of white. Vertex color correction — fixed the per-element index in the Vertex Color baker. Invert in Output — Invert now exported for Output-bar maps (Bitmap, Cellular, Falloff, etc.). 🛠️ Cleanup Legacy MaxScript removed — old .ms exporters removed; the C++ plugin is now the sole exporter.

Kelvin color temperature for lights (incl. Blender 5); optimization; velour/fabric improvements; fix Legacy PBR metal heuristic; bitmap crop

Rewritten as native C++ plugin, auto-build for 3ds Max 2022-2027

c_export.ms v4.7 update

Fabric/velour material conversion improvements

Light sizes and measures corrected; lights testing

Skin support; Hue Tint for Color_Correction; Translucency Color fix; fabrics, sheen

Lights export to Blender Cycles; sun corrected; light sizes and measures corrected

Improvements in conversion to Blender Cycles

Sheen support added

Improvements in Color correction

Lights import support

Long names 3ds Max -> Blender completed

Material names correction fixes

Long material names support for 3ds Max models

Long material names support: sanitized _safe_name matching in append/assign

Skin base support added

.dlu registration fixes, waits for load

Plugin architecture rework

Fix plugin behavior after 3ds Max restart; crash fix

Builds for 3ds Max 2024 and 2025

First standalone release: Window/Crossing Select split out of main Blender addon; downloadable as separate plugin

First client release of NodeFlowPlugin.dlu

First addon release

Auto-arrange nodes in clean columns after build

thin_walled = pure Translucent BSDF (Factor=1.0)

thin_walled = normal flip + Translucent BSDF mix

Fix thin_walled darkness: flip normal instead of Translucent BSDF

Fix thin_walled backface darkening via Geometry.Backfacing

thin_walled auto-translucency for foliage materials

Volume Absorption for colored glass/liquids

Fix glass Base Color using lerp instead of threshold check

Fix Color_Correction Brightness/Contrast scale

Legacy PBR Mix pattern detection + Glass BSDF

Metal+Transparent color mask

Jobs queue improved; fix double Base Color and spurious Transmission for metallic

Batch of key conversion changes

Rotation-aware offset formula (delta via cos/sin of rotation)

Fixed texture offset formula

Fix tiling mode: correct property names and mapping (CLIP/REPEAT/MIRROR/EXTEND)

Fix offset calculation when rotation is set

Fix UVW coordinate correspondence 3ds Max <-> Blender

UVW mapping correction

Rotation & hue handling

Texture rotation fix

Texture rotation support

Large batch of conversion updates

Brightness & contrast correction

New translucency handling

New data for color correction; Per-user jobs

Fix Non-Color colorspace for Normal and Displacement textures

Fix MultiTexture vertex color attribute name: Col -> Attribute

MultiTexture support; UV/map channel support 3ds Max -> Blender; balance handling

Initial version (v1)