Looking to get Max student for my daughter in college. 

I want to get 2008, but the school runs V9 and tells the students not to get 2008 because it would be incompatible with the schools version. 

Can’t 2008 save to a version 9 format to be used at school?

Randy

If it’s anything like (all) previous versions, then no - max has never been able to do that. Stick with Max9 until the school decides to upgrade.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

No.
Files saved in 2008 will not open in previous versions.

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

It’s a problem in my opinion they can’t figure out a loop hole for this. Maya you can fool it by changing the number in the ascii file .ma

This is of course as long as you’re not including things that were introduced into new versions

I did use a script back in the day that does take max data and saves as maxscript file then you run that script in earlier version and the work would come in fine, once again excluding new features in the export.

I wonder if that script is still around… If you do some work for a client and they use older version it kind of sucks that way. Sometimes .OBJ just isn’t enough.

MaxHomeMayaWork 22 October 2007 12:44 AM

I wonder if that script is still around…

http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/darkmoon/bff/

I was actually going to do some work on it as there are several known issues (objects with identical names do not export correctly even in different hierarchies, custom tangents in keyframe animations might be wrong etc.) but got sidetracked again…

Remember it was written back in Max 5 days. I am pretty sure it still works but if you find any problems, please post here.

Borislav “Bobo” Petrov

Lol - Old School indeed.

I think I had used that script back in the day for doing that very thing. The project was using old tools because the game engine was built around older max format. So I used new version for modeling and so forth and brought it back into lower version with that script or one similar.

Thanks for the link

I realize they make new versions to do the super new things the older versions didn’t.  But it seams silly not to be able to save a model to a format an earlier version can open.  Or to set 2008 in V9 mode for such export.

It just seams a waste to have to buy V9 when I can get all the super new things in 2008 for the same price.