Start up MAX and choose Import from the Files menu as it is shown below. This will open up a dialog that let's you choose which file you like to import.

Notice that you are now able, to import Xfrog files, as shown in the next picture.

Now find the folder you copied the example files to. I told you to remember it :-)

When you found it, move to the lily folder and choose the lilie2g.xfr file to load. this will open up a dialog box, which lets the user choose whether the textures of the generated material use premultiplied alpha or not. We will not use premultiplied alpha, so make sure you leave the box unchecked. If you want to know more about premultiplied alpha and how to use it, have a look at this tutorial.

Now the lily should load and appear on the screen after a moment. The duration of this depends as well on your system, as on the polygon count of the model you are loading. The lily is not that big and loads pretty fast. Your screen should look like this:

The plugin converts all materials, so that you do not have to do any mapping. But of course you can change every material in the materialeditor. And it is possible to edit the model, therefore just change it to editable mesh (e.g. via right click, using the quad menu or by using the modifer tab) and than you can adjust the mesh (for more information see step 3. Ok, now back to our example file. We still need to add the materials to the materials search path. For those, who have not done it: Choose Customize > Configure paths in MAX as shown in the next screenshot.

A dialog will pop up. choose the bitmaps/photometrics tab and klick on add path. This will let you choose the folder to include in the bitmap searchpaths. I choose \Program Files\3dsmax5\meshes\xfrog, as it is the location all my Xfrog files are stored. However it might be a different path on your computer.

After we adjusted the bitmap searchpaths, you might think we are ready now and indeed we are close to the end. We only need to adjust the animation time setting, which can be found in the right bottom corner of the MAX GUI. Here is a picture to show you the location of the controll button.

If you klick on this button, a dialog pops up, which gives you controll on the basic animation parameters, like frame rate, playback speed and animation length. And this is the option we got to change.

The original animation of the lily in Xfrog is 400 frames long and that is what we will put into the animation length dialog. Like this...

Now we are set. Our little animation is imported to 3ds MAX and we only have to choose a nice viewpoint and than we can render it.

Notice that if you save a imported Xfrog file in MAX, it only creates a link to the Xfrog file. This means that you can change the Xfrog model in Xfrog and all changes to the model will automatically be included in the MAX scene, when you open it next. But this also means that, if you delete a Xfrog model, any MAX scene containing this model will crash, as it is missing the Xfrog model.You also should be aware that changing a Xfrog model to editable mesh breaks the connection to the original Xfrog file.

You will find mor information on this topic in step 3 - tips and tricks

And this is, what the lily looks like rendered, without further tweaking:

and here you can download a little quicktime movie