3ds Max :: Import Range Of CAD Files

I was really excited to find that Max 2013 was able to import a range of CAD files, namely STEP.

Well, the good news is the import works well and the Body Objects look nice. The bad news is that there is no option at import time to specify course settings for the viewport display mesh. No problem I thought, I'll change them to "course" with the Body Utility and that should speed things up. Max crashed evertime I tried to do this, even with just 2 or 3 items selected.

Having given up with importing STEP, I tried the same assembly as a SAT file (about 100Mb). Importing SAT does give you the option to set the viewport model to a course setting (which is good) but only provides a marginal increase in speed. On the whole the model is unworkable. You can't select the component you want as the system will select some other part that you don't want and the lag is just unbelievable.

To put things into perspective I've used Max 2011 to import huge (1GB+) Formula One engine assemblies using nPower's Power Translators plugin. On the whole it worked well, I was able to work relatively fast and got the job done. While I understand that the Body Object is a subset of the nPower plugin, I think the implementation into Max 2013 has gone wrong somewhere.

My pain-free solution is to stick with Max 2011 until 2013 gets fixed, which is a shame as I really wanted to embrace the new version into my work.