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3D Studio Max Engine

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Rebecca Barbour
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This is probably the most commonly requested Tank engine right now!

It is pretty high complexity to build, since 3dsmax doesn't have built in python. We have tried out and experimented quite a bit with this already, and we have an experimental engine working with snapshotting, publishing and version control. 

We are currently getting some help from Autodesk's dev team with this and are hoping to have something to show you guys soon!

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    Permanently deleted user

    The 3dsmax engine is now part of the official Toolkit distribution! You can find documentation for it here: https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/95442348

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    Mathieu Leblanc

    We are trying toolkit for the first time and I've just discovered that it only support 3dsmax 2011 and 2012.

    What about 3dsmax 2013?  Do I need to compile Blur Py3dsmax myself?   And 2014 will it work without Blur Py3dsmax since it now have Python support?
    Thanks!
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    Ryan Mayeda

    Hi Mathieu!

    I see that you cross-posted with the shotgun-dev list, but I'll paste in my reply here as well...  :)

    Max 2014:
    This version of Max now has official Python support (hooray!).  Autodesk graciously looped us in and we got involved early on.  While testing functionality, we pretty much wrote the entire engine, which will, at least to start with, be a separate engine from the current one that is based on Blur's Py3dsMax.  However, we did hit a Qt-related issue that we're stuck on now and we're waiting to hear back from Autodesk on next steps.  There was also some chatter on their beta forums from others who've hit the same issue, so hopefully there will be a resolution soon.  Then we can release our engine for people who want to use Max 2014 with Toolkit.
    Max 2013:
    Our current Max engine had some issues with the Python 2.7 build of Py3dsMax, but we initially weren't sure how "beta" that build from Blur was meant to be.  So, we put that blurb up in our docs to recommend the previous Py3dsMax build until we could do more investigation.  However, with the help of a client (thanks Burrows!), we are prepping a new release of the Max engine that works with the current build of Py3dsMax.  Mike, here's the commit with the changes if you're interested.
    This release needs to be timed with an update to tk-multi-launchapp since the way Max gets launched needs a slight change in conjunction with the tweaks to the Max engine.  We should be able to get this all out this week still (the launcher also needs to be updated to work with Photoshop CC, which we are pretty much ready to add support for as well).  I'll reply to the thread when all of this is live.
    Ryan.
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    Patrick Macdonald

    Are there any plans to handle reference (xref) versioning in the same way as the "Scene Breakdown" tool in Maya? If not, is this a matter of it being low priority, or is there a technical/systemic reason why this would not be possible? 

    We are likley to be modelling, rigging and animating in Maya and transferring animated assets via alembic to 3ds Max for rendering. If there is no way to easily update cache paths to latest shotgun versions then this workflow would be a bit of a pain. 

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    Darragh D

    I know I'm quoting a request posted a year ago but a Scene Breakdown app would be great especially as Patrick mentioned - for versioning both xrefs of updated sets and alembic referencing.

     

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