Hi there, folks. I’m a Maya guy, but I’m interviewing for a Software R&D position at 3ds Max shop, so I want to learn the program, but also I’d like to play with the sdk. I downloaded the 30 day trial, but it doesn’t appear to come with the sdk (grepping for *.h yielded only 2 lonely header files).
So how does one obtain the sdk? Does it only come with the full version? And can anyone suggest some good resources for learning the sdk?
Cheers,
Kevin Atkinson
Hi,
Yeah it comes with the full version. You will need Visual Studio 2005 to compile plugins for max 9. As for resources, there aren’t many out there, other than the original reference. There is also an old discreet forum about the sdk, which is kinda dead, but still useful if you need specific info.
Light
You might want to check out the developer center:
And the old sparks knowledgebase:
http://sparks.discreet.com/search/
The sparks program is now being integrated into the Autodesk Developers Network.
And since nobody’s mentioned it… the SDK is pretty old and crufty these days. It’s useful to know that because pretty much the only things that you’d want to write in the SDK anymore are speed intensive routines, and then you’d probably want to expose them as script functions where you’d fill out the UI and the rest of your code in Maxscript.
I don’t know a single person that has worked with the SDK in the last 5 years who hasn’t said it’s terrible. Maxscript on the other hand continues to gain popularity.
-b
Thanks for the info, guys. Yeah, I’d be writing some high-performance stuff, and integrating 3rd party libraries.
And I, for one, am nearly out of patience with these cheesy, proprietary scripting languages (max script, mel) that the 3d software makers thrust upon us. Blech. Confessedly, I haven’t used maxscript, but I would vastly prefer to use something like Python. Maybe someone has done that integration work already…?
I don’t know a single person that has worked with the SDK in the last 5 years who hasn’t said it’s terrible. Maxscript on the other hand continues to gain popularity.
Yes, 3ds Max SDK is terrible but I love it :).
Now with the dotNet bridge in version 9, MAXScript is going more and more powerful.
And we can use .NET with the SDK using C++/CLI.