Having a lot of difficulty :/

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Find me a way to go Max to Blender without losing anything (UVMaps, animations, rigging, bones) and you got a deal.

What Chris4268 said. Export to a format that works with blender (*cough*lasticheckedMD3importingworkedgood*cough*) then try exporting using the .mdl exporter. (I'm pretty sure that leileilol has actually tried exporting a few md3 models and met with fairly good success.)

It won't help you with bones and rigging, but animations and UVMaps should be good, provided you've done them so that they'll work properly. (besides you'd lose rigging and bones exporting to just about any and every game usable model format anyway...)

[Downsider]

Max 9 doesn't have md3 export, no plugins for it either.

[MauveBib]

Max 9 doesn't have md3 export, no plugins for it either.

There are HL SMD plugins though, and lordhavoc's DPMODEL can convert SMD to MD3.

Why do you need to preserve the bones? They're lost on conversion to mdl anyway.

[Downsider]

Didn't know Blender supported vertex animations, that's why.

And when I export an SMD, certain vertices get unrigged.

[MauveBib]

Shrug. I've never had that problem so I can't help.

[Downsider]

Okay. Collada worked great, animations and all in Blender now.

However, the texture's been removed from the model in the process. Anybody know how to simply apply a texture to each object in Blender? It's a really obscure and strange program, the interface sucks.