Exporting high poly meshes from Rhino to 3ds Max what happens to blocks?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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Perhaps I’ve complicated this issue by using Lands Design, but I have a mix of some high poly meshes that represents trees. I noticed to export from Lands Design I can explode the plants, creating a lot of meshes. I also have some block instances that are meshes that aren’t from Lands Design. This issue is further complicated by the fact that some of these things have V-Ray materials.

I’m wondering what the best way is to export these to 3ds Max? I know in theory it should be .FBX format, but for some reason I can’t import into .FBX, because it just gets stuck on “import envelope” in Max.

This appears to be a known issue with 3ds Max that hasn’t been fixed -

Anyway, I would use .DWG, but it doesn’t seem to work with textures on simpler meshes either regardless of if it’s a Physically Based or V-Ray material and just imports as black, and I need textures to be imported for these trees because a lot of the leaves aren’t actually modeled out, they’re just simple planes with transparent cutout leaf textures.

I’m wondering what happens to things that are blocks when I export them (for example, is there any noticeable benefit to using block instances, or does it get exploded anyway?)

So far, I have tried:

  1. Export from Rhino using .FBX.
  2. Export from Rhino using .DWG (this imports more simple meshes, but none of the textures or materials are retained, regardless of whether or not I check plug-in data and textures; using the Scene Converter to convert V-Ray materials doesn’t seem to work either. [Not sure if this is because I don’t have V-Ray for Max?]).
  3. Export as .SKP file (this exports from Rhino with some error message about not everything being exported, and crashes Max).
  4. Currently trying OBJ, but it’s taking forever to export and import…not crashing yet!

I get that this wasn’t the smartest decision to do something mesh-heavy in Rhino, but I’m wondering if there is anything I can do to salvage the situation? Even being able to match camera viewports in Max and Rhino and rendering them separately and overlaying in Photoshop would be great, but I can’t seem to get the cameras to match either…

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What happens if you us OBJ. But export in parts.
Grab the model by a few layers and do Export Selected. Then import those into 3DS max? It may just reduce the load on importing and exporting the whole thing at once.