3d Studio Max

Hi please excuse my naive knowledge on this, but I was wondering can I use 3d Studio max on its own to create sculpties if I save as a 24bit TGA?
If not, do I need to have a plugin to be able to make sculpties on max?

Sorry its a rather basic question, ive tried flicking through this forum cant seem to get a striaght awnser.

Kind Regards

I have been using Chip Midnights tutorial to some very dissapointing results. Now however I have heard that Maya and Blender are much better at exporting sculpties so it might be in your best interest to export your mesh as an obj and import it into Blender (Free) or Maya (Max's Nemesis Step Sister that costs just as much).

If your exporting from max make sure you turn off true color and paletted, found under customize>preferences>rendering, this will help with dithering that can occur when max down samples from 64 bit color to 24 bit color. As far as output goes though, the shape your exporting matters more then the application your exporting from, all the applications use a similar method for exporting maps, however the maya export does contain the ability to output scale and position values for use with a script set and bake the surface lighting information at the same time. Personally I still prefer max because I'm more comfortable with it's modeling and mapping toolset, but every modeler is different so find the one that suits you best in that respect.