I just saw Chris Diggins’ blog post about the .Net SDK wrapper shipping with the new subscription pack. I haven’t had time to play around with it myself, but it sounds exciting. My main question though, for anyone who has actually worked with the SDK, is what kind of things can I do by tapping in to it that I can’t already do with vanilla MaxScript? Both examples he showed were just different ways of doing something I can more easily do already.
Not being a C++ programmer and having no experience with the SDK, I’m not even sure what doors this opens for me.
The new state-sets and zookeeper are based on this .NET-Wrapper.
Since this is a (very) thin layer around the entire c++ sdk and because it
gets compiled to native-code at runtime, i would expect it to be much more performant
then maxscript.
A nice tutorial by the original author:
http://vimeo.com/11191227
And hopefully Christopher will expand it to something that looks a bit more
like the .net BCL.
What makes me wonder:
- this new DLL comes in the SAP pack for Max 2012
- thus all scripts and code will only run installations having the SAP pack installed
on the other hand:
- EPHERE let’s you freely download the wrapper ( older version from Jan 2011, but still…)
- the EPHERE version supports back from Max 2009 up to Max 2012
- EPHERE commercial is $675 per 5 seat, free for non-commercial use
- there ARE differences between Autodesk vs. Ephere wrapper, but i guess just the version currently
thus i assume :
- i can download the EPHERE wrapper and it provides basically the same functionality
- EPHERE version still will be maintained, because Zookeeper is based on it
- it’s possible to write scripts/tools using that wrapper and have back to Max2009 support
( exclusive some SDK additions)
Maybe this dotnet interface can solve the problems with trying to do things on another thread or with the communication from the outside to max, because it runs on the same thread!?
-Johan
Has anyone actually installed the subscription update? I’m not seeing the dll files mentioned in the SDK documentation here. Either I didn’t install it correctly, or the documentation is wrong. Can anyone else verify?
I am guessing the docs are wrong, and what you need is the Autodesk.Max.Wrappers.dll and possibly the Autodesk.Max.dll.
-Eric