Blender → 3ds Max — Now Available in NodeFlow Platform
Reverse conversion is now available on NodeFlow Platform! The feature is currently experimental and under active development.
Read the entryBehind the scenes
This converter was built by an archviz artist who got tired of rebuilding materials by hand
Below is what usually never makes it onto a website: one material taken apart node by node, a blind test, a month-by-month development journal, and an honest list of what still doesn't work. Everything on this page is us talking. What our users make of it is on the next page over.
None of this was written by a marketing department. We don't have one.
Evgeniy Litvyakov — founder, developer, working archviz artist
Check it yourself
Which one is 3ds Max, and which is Blender?
The same scene. One rendered in 3ds Max, the other in Cycles after conversion. Guess first, then reveal.
A?
B?
B is Blender. Not a single shader was touched after conversion. The fabric, the cushions and the fringe of the throw came across exactly; the giveaway is the side tables — dark metal arrives over-lit and matte, which is precisely the bug still open on the list below.
«Думаю, блендер справа. Если не ошибаюсь, у 3д макс более яркие оттенки получаются на рендере. Но приятнее выглядит именно тот, что справа»
"I think Blender is the one on the right. If I'm not mistaken, 3ds Max gives brighter tones on the render. But the one on the right actually looks nicer."
Вагиф
One material under the microscope
What happens between Corona and Cycles
On the left, the seat material as an artist built it in 3ds Max: a CoronaLayeredMtl, two CoronaLegacyMtl, a four-layer Composite, two Falloff maps, a Cellular and three Color Corrections. On the right, what Cycles assembled out of it on its own, without a single mouse click. Click either image to look closer.
Pipeline
Four steps, of which you only ever see two
01
The scene goes to the server
Via the 3ds Max plugin, or as a plain archive if Max isn't installed on the machine at all.
02
The parser takes the materials apart
Every map, every blend mode, every slider. All 25 blend modes were verified one by one: three behaved incorrectly, four more silently collapsed into plain blending.
03
The graph is rebuilt for Cycles
Not a texture import but a rebuild of the node tree: color space, texture coordinates, offset, tile, rotation, crop — none of it transfers, all of it has to be recomputed.
04
The add-on picks up the finished .blend
About a minute per asset from 3ds Max, two to three when the archive is uploaded directly.
What still breaks
The list nobody usually publishes
Converting between two different engines is never one-to-one: Cycles simply doesn't have half of Corona's nodes. Here's what doesn't work right now — so you find out here, and not two hours into a job. Closed items stay on the list, so you can see what gets fixed.
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open
Corona Hair & Fur doesn't transfer and isn't on the near-term roadmap. If your pipeline depends on it, we can't help you yet.
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closed
Cars and metallics. Chrome, plastic and wheels used to arrive flattened into matte — from both Corona and V-Ray. Fixed.
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closed
Working over a VPN. Some users couldn't reach the server through a VPN. Solved.
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closed
3ds Max smoothing groups. Long an open question — now solved.
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closed
Cancel button for a running conversion. Done: a job can now be pulled out of the queue.
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closed
The "0 of 3" counter on the free plan read as "you're out of conversions". Fixed the wording.
Journal
What we worked on
Notes on how the build is going. Old ones stay — together they show how fast the project actually moves.
The bridge is becoming two-way
Not every development update needs a node graph or a benchmark. Sometimes it is two tired developers looking at the screen and seeing reverse conversion, Blender to 3ds Max, work for the first time.
Read the entryDirect conversion without 3ds Max on your machine
The archive goes to the server straight from the Blender add-on: the scene is parsed on our side and a finished .blend comes back.
Read the entryWent through the blend modes and sped up heavy scenes
All 25 blend modes checked one by one, 31 material and map classes closed, and a 1,500-object scene went from "forever" to roughly 7 seconds.
Read the entryThe eighth pass at texture coordinates
Offset, tile, rotation and crop all at once — the hardest problem of the whole build. Eight attempts before it lined up.
Read the entryFirst demo, beta opens
The beta opened on 22 June. The plugin only supported 3ds Max 2025, Corona lights did not transfer at all, glass came out black.
Read the entry
The other half of the story
Half of this wasn't found by us
Almost every journal entry started as somebody else's message in the chat. What the beta actually dug up over three months, in their numbers and their words, is on its own page.
What's next
The journal keeps going
Once a month a new teardown lands here, along with an updated list of what's being fixed. Discussion and bug reports live in Telegram — that's where every story on this page came from.
Last updated: September 2026 · Quotes published with their authors' permission