How can i...?

[Bitonius]

I have been extracting some files to obj format since its easy format but if i wanted to get bones data and the sort,
what format should i learn to extract that data to? preferably for importing to max.
Also been trying to flip dds images but whitout much success how could i accomplish this?.
Thanks

[Bastien]

You need weights in the mesh data (usually in a per vertex basis: each vertex has a reference to which bones affects it and by how much (0-255 or 0-1) ) You can start by that.

Once you're importing meshes with weights, you can import the skeleton.
For each bone you at least need to look for:
*an index
* a parent index (if no parents, usually is -1)
* a transform matrix , which varies a lot depending on the skeleton format (maybe position, scale and rotations are given separately and you have to calculate it yourself)
* Info if the transform matrix/rot-scale-pos for each bone is given relative to it's parent or relative to skeleton/world space. This is useful also depending on how 3ds max handles bones transforms.

I'd recommend just looking some existing 3ds max script, I only remember one recent about RE6 for capcom's .mod, which has the skeleton structure pretty much all figured out.

Also been trying to flip dds images but whitout much success how could i accomplish this?

You shouldn't flip the image itself, only the UVs, but it's also not necessary at least in blender, you can just use mapping.scale[y] = -1, which has the same effect. Probably there's something similar in Maya/Max

[Bitonius]

Mmm Very nice indeed, guess it was about time i figured what the other bytes in a vert struct could be for.
Also the image flip was for when its a CG from the game rather than a texture model since they may come upside down, manually flipping each of them on photoshop is no fun.
I thought it would just need to have its bytes inverted so that the final byte becomes the first one but it didnt work. any thoughts on it?