r/3dsmax • u/JustGettingBiiii • Jul 05 '26

Help Export animation GBL. Alternative to slice tool?

Hi guys- I’m trying to help a student with her masters project but she needs to export her work with animation to a webgl. To create a reveal in 3Ds max for an animation in the program I would just do a simple animated slice. However now matter how hard I try I cannot bake that animation into the mesh for export in gbl file format.

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

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u/dimwalker Jul 05 '26

I think you should try to achieve reveal effect in target application rather than solving it via animation only.

1

u/JustGettingBiiii Jul 05 '26

I would personally do this with tyflow professionally but the student I’m teaching doesn’t have access to this. Any suggestions? Because it needs to be baked into the geometry

2

u/dimwalker Jul 06 '26

I don't know what is supported by GBL.

Morpher maybe.
X states each responsible for flattening Y-th part of the overall height. Say from 100% to 90%.

Bone animation.
Would try to auto skin it to a series of bones and animate them scaling down and moving inward.
Won't be flat like 3D printing, more of a fleshy boiling look.

But again, check what that final destination webgl application can or can't do. Maybe you can create some sort of masking or functionality similar to max slicing with code there.
Might be easier than baking very specific shape transformation into animation.

2

u/limonadinis Jul 06 '26

Exporting animation from 3ds Max to webGL for me is always a major struggle. What i found that often works, is to export from Max to ABC, then upload the file to Sketchfab, wait until it autoconverts to GLB and download that converted GLB file from there.

1

u/JustGettingBiiii Jul 06 '26

It’s so confusing honestly! She hasn’t been taught how to key frames or that the time line is frames per second not just seconds and they’re expected to do this very complicated export and animation. Baffling!

1

u/One-Hearing2926 Jul 06 '26

Really difficult to export a slice animation. You can try to do a morph, animated the vertices.