Custom material plugin for Max?
admin
We're updating our 3ds Max material export pipeline, and we're thinking about coding a custom material that streamlines just the options we need to support for our game engine.
Awhile back I did some research into using MXS to customize a material, but it seemed people encountered quite a few pitfalls with insufficient documentation, missing features, or just plain bugginess. Maybe writing a custom material plugin instead is less problematic than using maxscript?
Previewing in the Max viewport is not as important right now for us as it is to support the various checkboxes, spinners, and map slots we need. Right now we're shoehorning everything into the existing default UI, and it's getting hard to keep track of everything.
We're also hoping to avoid spending too much time creating code that's only for Max, as we'll be porting our exporter to other apps (Maya /Softimage/etc.) at some point in the future.
If anyone has some experience or guidance about coding up a game-exportable material setup, I'd love to hear what you have to say. Any gotchas, things to avoid, things you learned the hard way, etc.?
Awhile back I did some research into using MXS to customize a material, but it seemed people encountered quite a few pitfalls with insufficient documentation, missing features, or just plain bugginess. Maybe writing a custom material plugin instead is less problematic than using maxscript?
Previewing in the Max viewport is not as important right now for us as it is to support the various checkboxes, spinners, and map slots we need. Right now we're shoehorning everything into the existing default UI, and it's getting hard to keep track of everything.
We're also hoping to avoid spending too much time creating code that's only for Max, as we'll be porting our exporter to other apps (Maya /Softimage/etc.) at some point in the future.
If anyone has some experience or guidance about coding up a game-exportable material setup, I'd love to hear what you have to say. Any gotchas, things to avoid, things you learned the hard way, etc.?