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First I've heard of it.  I think I'll give it a try the next time I feel like modeling.  

A Shark.

OR a ninja.

Pretty sure Santa IS a ninja.  How else could he deftly break into your home, deliver his payload, and exit silently without being seen?  

Lucky bastards and your snow.   Although, people keep telling me it's not as fun as it looks.

Anyway, merry Christmas guys.

I don't know if there is an option that will make them retain their shape exactly but, if you only select small areas of polys at a time and unwrap those sections individually, they tend to retain most of their shape. 

You can also use seams in 3d View to mark the separation between these small areas.  After that, all you have to do is select all the vertices and unwrap them and Blender should automatically arrange the sections of the mesh in the UV Editor in such a way that they dont over lap each other.  You can even select each section as an "island" and easily move it around without worrying about interfering with the other sections.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/UV_Map_Basics

Haha, nice.
Make a shot of him trying to munch on a pilot or the side of a power generator. 
I seem to remember them trying to attack the buildings in my base.

Tribes 2 is also free now, which could be great if you have people who have played it before, but I think new comers might find it a bit complicated to just jump in with the others.

There's got to be something, like....

ummm....

uhhh...


Oh, creamed spinach! Not even bacon could make that stuff good. Creamed spinach is inherently evil.
Hurray for 200 posts, finally

Tomato, basil and mozzarella toasted sandwich.  Add some pepper; simple and delicious.

In fact, I love almost anything with tomato and basil, they just go so well together.

The Blender 3D: Noob to Pro guide shows how to set up a simple set of bones (or armatures).  Just look at the Using Bones page.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

How old is the version of OM's exporter that you guys are talking about? Has he made any versions since the one from 2007 on his site?

Because the one I've used does use the correct numbers for rotation and translation animation, though it had several other problems that I had to fix.  But if that single number in the animation key is all that is wrong, then it's not hard to find which part to correct in the exporter file.  Worked for me on a similar problem.  And it will save you time.

You can just open the xsi in wordpad and search for FrameTransformMatrix.  There should be one at the top of the entry for each object in the model.  I believe this what one should look like after reseting the transform and scaling:

   FrameTransformMatrix {
      1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,
      0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,
      0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,
      0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,1.000000;;
   }

If you have different numbers, and its on one of the objects that's not looking right, then that might be your problem.

What do the transform matrices of the parts look like in the .xsi file?  How do the matrices of the ones that are working properly compare to the ones that are not?

Huh. Looks like it's going to involve a lot of up close cgi. Hope it doesn't look really obvious.

Is anyone else having a problem in which each sub-object is rotated -90 degrees on the x-axis when you export from blender?  Like, even if the subobject's rotational transform in blender is set to 0, it still comes out as -90 in the .xsi file.  And this isn't a problem that I can fix by just rotating the whole object 90 degrees because when I have a hierarchy of subobjects, each parent that remains rotated effectively rotates its child in addition to the rotation that the child is stuck with.  Sorry, I know that isn't a very good explanation so, imagine a model made of a long chain of pieces that should all lay flat.  While the model lies flat in blender, it curls up like a rolled up tube of toothpaste in BZ2.  

In the xsi file, each transform matrix looks something like this:
FrameTransformMatrix
{
1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,-0.000000,-1.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,1.000000,-0.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,0.629800,0.000000,1.000000;;

If I manually change each matrix to something like this:
FrameTransformMatrix
{
1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,
0.000000,0.629800,0.000000,1.000000;;

Then my model looks fine in bz2.

I don't know if this caused your problem but, I know when you first install Gmax or when you first start it up, it asks you which display driver you want to use.  The choices are HEIDI, OpenGL, and Direct3D.  I've found HEIDI works well for me in Xp and Vista.  If the error occurred before you were able to choose that option Ahadley might be right in that you don't meet the system requirements.