Ok, here's something to try for 3ds Max fans. Now that stefaneke has demonstrated going back
to the game from .ms3d format, convert a .variant_weighted_mesh file to .ms3d. Open in Milkshape,
go to the menu item File->Export->Alias FBX... and make a .fbx file with your model. Launch 3ds Max
and go to menu item File->Import and set the Files of type combobox to
Autodesk (*.FBX, *.DAE)
and then import your model. The comments seem to be lost so the shader settings in the model
comment get creamed. But you do get your meshes, bones, etc. Max supports exporting to .fbx
as well because Autodesk owns the fbx format. Milkshape licenses their API for this so you can
re-import a changed file from Max back into Milkshape (the fbx format is proprietary and undocumented
so you can't write to it directly, you have to use Autodesk's API to do anything with it).
The model looks odd back in Milkshape because Milk's default settings for bones seems to be changed
in this process (but the verts, tris etc. are all ok). You don't get the big blue circles like you get
when you first launch Milkshape, but the joints don't display quite the same way.
If you love Max this might be fun to play with and see if there is anything more than the comments
that get lost. (Comments aren't a big deal, the shader stuff could either be hard-coded if it is
the same for all models, or else written to a .txt file and copy/pasted back in to the comment after
your changes have been made in Max.)
I mention this for laziness's sake, I really don't want to redo the ms3dImporterExporter.ms Max Script
for ETW if it isn't necessary.