Ok so I'm using fbx to export skinned models and their skeletons to 3ds. Now I tried to bind a character with serveral meshes and I got this error. Apparently the bindpose is not found 
warning: skin definition(4)
The plug-in has found the following skin definition problems :
Unable to find the bind pose for : / root / back1 / leftLeg / leftKnee / leftAnkle / leftAnkleOrient / leftFoot / leftToes1 / leftToes2 / leftToesEnd. No bind poses in the hierarchy containing the object will be exported.
Unable to find the bind pose for : / root / back1 / leftLeg / leftLegTwist1 / leftLegTwist2. No bind poses in the hierarchy containing the object will be exported.
Unable to find the bind pose for : / root / back1 / rightLeg / rightKnee / rightAnkle / rightAnkleOrient / rightFoot / rightToes1 / rightToes2 / rightToesEnd. No bind poses in the hierarchy containing the object will be exported.
Unable to find the bind pose for : / root / back1 / rightLeg / rightLegTwist1 / rightLegTwist2. No bind poses in the hierarchy containing the object will be exported.
It works fine when I combine everything and I only have one skincluster node. Made a test with just 2 spheres skinned to one joint chain and then it worked just fine.
*edit
Got rid of the export errors by unchecking "remove unused infuences". However I still get this when I import into max:
[WARNING] BindPose - Mismatched Matrices -
The relative matrix of the following link(s) do not match the one stored in the BindPose definition.
back1
back2
back3
back4
neck1
neck2
head
headOrient
jaw
jawEnd
headEnd
leftEar1
leftEar2
leftEar3
leftEar4
leftEarEnd
rightEar1
rightEar2And so on for every bone in the skeleton.