A bit of background first… well in Max you can use almost any given object as a bone[joint]and many people do that because it’s much easer to work with dummies(it’s a helper object type like an “empty”) or plain geometry, than it is with bones. Converting a dummy to a bone is virtually impossible.
The exporter that ships with panda dosen’t export morph-type animations, it dose not export vertex-type animations and finally animations with a deforming dummy objects don’t get exported as well. It’s bones or bust, all the way.
So… is anyone out there willing and able to change the export script in some way to use dummies for animations?
I know there aren’t many panda users keen on 3dsmax but in general max is quite popular.