I was doing a bit of research on how to create the w3d files we need to change the art in the game and I was watching a video on it and noticed 3dsmax 8 natively supports .w3d files and creates and saves them from a menu.
I also reread the forum posts from a different website and it says w3d support was dropped in 3dsmax 9 and newer.
If anyone has a copy of 3dsmax 8 they do not need or can verify that it supports .w3d files natively please respond to this thread.