Hello. I'm mostly a Maya person. I know that max can export .3ds files that Irrlicht can use. Maya can export .obj files that Irrlicht can use. These formats are included with the software but there are more exporters that get for either program.
I agree that it would be cool if a 3d engine could natively read 3ds max .max files or maya .mb or .ma files but that would not be very efficient. These files contain large amounts of extraneous data that only 3ds max or maya needs to have. For instance, a Maya scene can contain polygon objects, NURBS, subdivision surfaces, cameras, lights, lightshapes, hypershade graphs, 3dtexture placement nodes, paint effects, fluids, live action camera matchmoving nodes, render attributes for several different renderers, cloth solvers, particles, soft body dynamics, rigid bodies, construction history, bones, animation channels, etc, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much all the 3d engine wants or needs is the bare geometry, animation, and textures. So we export to formats without all the extra garbage.
If you end up with Maya, I just wrote a MEL script that will quickly export your whole scene into a .irr format that you can easily load into Irrlicht.
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=24063
If you are just starting out with 3d modeling, I'd advise you to take your time and learn as much as you can before you try a large project. Good luck.
