I recently downloaded the .nif exporter release candidate that apparently has some basic Skyrim functionality for 3DS Max. However, when I open Max or attempt to export, it gives me an error message saying there is a missing ini file, but I saw nothing inside the download archive for the export plugin. Has anyone else been successful with this? If not, I patiently await the next release, and as always thanks to the awesome people who work on these things for nothing but the love of modding.

Just do it in Nifskope. I do.

Export a .max file as a .nif from Nifskope?

Huh? Doesn't compute.

@PhiniusMaster: I don't remember the exact procedure, or which version of NifTools I ended up with. It's confusing because the version profiled on the NifTools download site is in fact not the version we need.

However, I assume you found the correct version as I did using the needle in a haystack method.

The installer (as I recall) asks which version of 3DS Max you want to install the tools for and places the plugin where it should go. In your case, perhaps that did not happen properly.

Do you have multiple versions of 3DS installed? Did you select the correct version/s?

It sounds like you are close to success. I encourage you to pursue this further. It can be done.

http://www.mediafire.com/?d2gjf3vvbys74xi as it is kind of hard to find !!

EDIT : Use Link below posted by The Hologram for more recent versions !!

Might I recommend this link instead. Not sure if you are linking to my mediafire account but that link will not be updating.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5622 [skyrim.nexusmods.com]

I updated to 3.7.3 last night. Not saying its better but hopefully it is. Hopefully fixes some collision and vertex color issues.

Knew I had seen a more recent one somewhere but could not find it using search on the Net -- and the Niftools forum links link to Nifskope instead of the MAX tools (think the links were incorrectly entered) or they lead to a thread with links that are no longer working.

Makes sense now to see them on the NEXUS but never looked there ! -- Thanks for the work you have put into this !!

I would like to ask if that 3.7.3. version is capable of exporting real collision instead of hacking trough the convex shape stuff in nifskope.

Awesome, thanks so much for the link(s) guys.

Should export the original data types including Mopp shapes. I added some support so that it should also work with 64-bit max. I've not had much testing time with it but I was able to roundtrip several nif files with each type of collisiion to something that looked correct to my eye. Feel free to post bug reports at nexus though I'm not promising much in terms of effort as I'm busy and programming max with sdk and niflib is a huge time sink.

Edit: The new multishape collision isn't supported though. That looks like it will be really efficient on really large objects complicated objects. Maybe more than the mopp tree.