format hopping has a way of raping your models to death. making them buggy and loose somewhat important data, such as smoothing or uv. as for .3ds format, ive seen it shread more models than takashi, and thats saying something. half the time it only works for single objects, the format has countless versions, so a 3ds saved from truespace 6 wont load in max at all and 3ds files from max wont load in truespace at all. id go as far as saying its worse than cob.
actually it occurred to me that it may be the xform bug which was making my heirarchy come out wrong. so i reset the xform on everything and the problem still remains. as you can see in max and the results in modelview, and this is after applying reset xform to every object in the scene. i actually thought i had fixed it, but my hierarchy was wrong with the gatling models were siblings, rather than children to the barrels. i probibly set it up like that to test something else in the model. anyway after reconfiguring the hierarchy properly it still gave me crap. then i stripped out every option accept for turrets, still nothing.
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