Hi all,
Just updated my site with some of my latest dotnet research. It’s a custom control i’ve been working on to simplify how i build UI’s in max.
That looks very good Pete!
Yes, .NET custom controls are powerful and easy to develop. We can now create very good user interfaces with them and improve the tools.
Thanks for sharing.
Really good idea. Straightforward, simple, useful.
Noobish enquiry: have you looked into wpf interfaces/XAML? Is this reachable from maxscript?
hi yannick, J.robin, thanks for your comments, I really appreciate them.
I’m really excited about the possibility of custom controls in max. I am hoping to release some more soon. For example, if I set up a slider system for characters, i like to have buttons that allow me to set keys for values and reset and nudge values. but with say 15 sliders that is just a lot of work to set up all the different ui elements. With a dotnet custom control, you can do this. This particular control uses a slider that allows you to fine tune the value by rolling the mouse wheel after scrubbing. I think its really interactive to use. The user control itself has a custom setkey event too, that you can use in max to set values based on the slider.
[left]And J.Robin, I haven’t really looked into WPF yet, although i plan to when i get some time! It looks really interesting. In answer to your question, this is not reachable by maxscript yet as it is from dotnet framework 3.0. We can currently access methods up to framework version 2.0 but who knows, that may change in the future!
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Thanks for the reply, let’s hope the tie-in advances to .net 3 soon. But what I really like is the simple attitude whereby you just hoik all the files of a certain type from one location. It makes the tool surprisingly general, doesn’t it? I started in UNIX, and it reminds me …sigh…:).
Soon we’ll all have to make our UIs exlusively with .NET anyway… until somebody decides that’s not good enough (static controls? really? it’s 2010 – let’s get some vector graphics in there!) and we have to rewrite again for Silverlight+.NET. Though I suppose maybe by that time maxscript will be gone and we’ll be coding in something standard-ish like C# anyway.
Looks cool though
Thanks chaps!
You’re absolutely right Richard, I was talking to a programmer friend the other day and he mentioned that I should look at WPF for all the media related methods. I said “C’mon! give me a chance to learn the old stuff first!” It’s the eternal position of being one step behind everything I guess!
I do think that there is a lot of overlap with programming dotnet after learning a bit of maxscript. If you get the concepts of what its about it’s a bit easier to pick up another language. I’d have to say that it’s influenced my maxscripting too, as I structure things a little better now!
About WPF, I was able to use them in Max in a simple utility plugin with a ElementHost in a Windows Form.
Yay!
Another noobish question.
.net 3 is additive to .net 2. Reflection hasn’t changed, has it? So if you write your own control with .net3 calls, which presents its own interface via reflection to MXS, why shouldn’t you be able to get MXS to load the assembly as normal, and use it in just the same way as you use existing .net 2 assemblies?
I think, it is possible. Can play with the 3dsmax.exe.config file with in 3dsmax installation folder.
Anyway, great going guys. Lots of GUI magic possible using .net easily compare to win32 or MFC. It is also interesting to see; some main stream game companies start to use C# as scripting language by embeding MONO runtime. Which is like .net cross language but unlike .net cross platform as well ( Not MS only ).
http://www.go-mono.com/pdfs/Otee_v21.pdf