Blender > Max > GTA IV Process (Patreon)

Here's a video, not of me, but of fellow modder Al Alvarez demonstrating how to get a sweater from Blender (already rigged and perfect as can be) into 3DS Max and exported to openformats for GTA IV, with utmost ease.

I personally don't have 3DS Max on my PC for a plethora of reasons, so I unfortunately have to rely on others for this process, and pray every night for a Blender plugin for the last GTA to not have one.

1. your FBX needs to be already rigged and ready to go, as if, pretending that there were some sort of Blender Plugin for GTA IV, that was ready for export through that. and it needs to be in "actual size".

You MUST import the FBX FIRST. If you import it after openformats, it will end up very, very tiny.

DO NOT PAY ANY ATTENTION TO WHITE NONSENSE STREAKED ACROSS YOUR SCREEN thats just how 3DS max will interpret a Blender armature, for whatever reason. Do NOT delete it, it must stay in the scene, or else the sweater will lose rigging.

2. Import the example .odd (or .odr, in this case, as it's a Niko drawable). 

3. Select your sweater from the FBX, and then open up the Material editor in 3DS max. Scroll down to find Scene Materials. You want to double click the vanilla material from the openformats uppr you imported so it appears in that node viewport. You make sure that material is selected, and then you assign the material to your sweater.

4. Now all you need to do is drag and drop the sweater to where it's supposed to be, deleting the original uppr_006 and renaming your sweater to the very same. (The video ends here.)

5. All you need to do now is export. Now here's what I've found:

3DS Max 2012, like GIMS IV assures, is the most ideal for clothes. 

But I've found that Max 2012 does NOT like rigged faces. In an earlier post of mine, I showed you 1997 Cutscene Packie McReary. His head was exported with Max 2017, on the initial go, while the rest of him was exported with Max 2012. His head, with completely vanilla, untouched weights exported from 2012  noticeably distorted.

You also may want to split your mesh by the sharps in order for it to appear as such upon import into Max.

6. Theres a lot you can do with OpenFormats after this, like replacing the embedded textures on a Niko drawable with the correct ones, replacing the ones the example had. And you can use Notepad (or Notepad++) to assign it the correct diffuse texture.