Behind 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
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.
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
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.
Four steps, of which you only ever see two
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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open
Cars and metallics. Chrome, plastic and wheels arrive flattened into matte — from both Corona and V-Ray. Reproduces reliably; we're on it.
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open
Working over a VPN. Some users can't reach the server through a VPN. It's a routing problem rather than a plugin one, and we have no quick fix yet.
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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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open
3ds Max smoothing groups. Still an open question, no solution yet.
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open
Cancel button for a running conversion. Agreed but not built yet — a job can't be pulled out of the queue.
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open
The "0 of 3" counter on the free plan reads as "you're out of conversions". We'll fix the wording.
What we worked on this month
A new entry once a month. Old ones stay — together they show how fast the project actually moves.
Direct 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. Cameras, splines and lights transfer too, V-Ray scenes included.
Went through the blend modes and sped up heavy scenes
All 25 modes checked one by one: three behaved incorrectly, four more silently collapsed into plain blending. 31 material and map classes closed. A 1,500-object scene went from "forever" to roughly 7 seconds.
The 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. Color space was fixed in the same pass: normal maps stopped arriving in sRGB.
First demo, beta opens
The beta opened on 22 June. The plugin only supported 3ds Max 2025, Corona lights didn't transfer at all, glass came out black. Everything still on the open list above is what survived three months of this.
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.
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