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[Closed] Mcg and Maxscript

Hi

I hope those who know how to work with MCG help me here.

The very question is if i know how to play with maxscript can this help me on MCG ? or MCg has its own rules and thechnique and diffrent …

Here an example. I like to copy an object on a curve or spline.

If it is in Maxscript (one of the way) , for example with

lengthInterp lengthTangent

I can make what i want .

But how about MCG. does MCG have lengthInterp and lengthTangent ?

I mean does MCG has the same keywords which we use in maxscript ? or they change it or put it in a diffrent node and …

If it has the same keywords how to find them? if there is no same keywords how to know to build my tools with all these various nodes?

Thanks in advance

9 Replies

Completely different, different language, different toolset, different approach – expression based vs. functional, weak typing vs strog typing etc. That said, for some things some keywords might be similar, there are not so many ways to name something, after all.

Not sure what kind of answer you expect here, just browse the included example node graphs, look at graphs people are creating, read the documentation – that’s all there’s to it. Being able to grok functional programming helps, too. No recursion nor pattern matching yet, though.

Oh and for your example problem, distributing object along spline, maxscript will be faster anyway.

Thanks a lot Swordslayer

Another question is ? why there is no Reference ? Why almost always Max does this i mean lack of tutorial

and reference for Rigging and Maxscript now MCG ?

You are right one way of learning of MCG or Maxscript is to open others script or Mcg to learn , but how did they begins ?

Thanks again for your answer and participation

1 Reply
(@gandhics)
Joined: 11 months ago

Posts: 0

Have you check Martin’s blog?
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/author/mcgblog

How about Christoper’s?
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/author/christopher-diggins
He also shared 2 sample packs. A lo of samples.

Dave has one.
https://davewortley.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/mcg-tutorial-how-to-make-a-select-by-face-area-modifier/

Elrara has a few
http://www.elarasystems.com/insights/case-studies/elara-labs/

Paul neale has one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQLuRl7Nn1M

Many max specific terms are actually coming from Maxscript.

I don’t even have time to chew all these.So… I guess it would be more than enough to start.

As I’ve said, look at the examples that are included, look at other people’s graphs and find out what the compounds are composed of. There are also some official tutorials here, some unofficial scattered across the web and facebook and some mcg graphs at scriptspot. You either have a tinkerer’s mind and will enjoy the challenge – or not in which case there’s no advice that could help you.

Thanks so much for your help especially for the links gandhics

Type *spline into the node search. You will find all the nodes/compounds with spline in the name.

SplineInterpolate – Interpolate along a Spline, t must be between 0.0 and 1.0
There are various tangent nodes and compounds so I would look though those.

-Eric

Thanks Eric for the reply

But my reason for this thread was, could i get any help from Maxscript to do MCG better and easier ? and it seems that the answer is NOOOOOOO.

For the tips you’ve pointed out. That was a good point. It shows : AutoSmoothSpline , CircleSpline, ClosePointOnSpline and … but what are they doing and what are for ?Just a description on the button of MCG window , which AutoSmoothSpline says :

smoothing factor should be beteen 0.0 and 1.0 for best results

And because of the same thing ( 0.0 and 1.0 ) I think i should begin form here what a great help from MCG.

By the way.

Thanks for the Tips That was a help

To be fair, at least the description for AutoSmoothSplines was not bad.
As it said, it will make spline smooth and smoothFactor will decide the smoothness.

AutoSmoothSplines(s, smoothFactor)
Computes the segment tangents and set every segment type to bezier. The smoothing factor should be beteen 0.0 and 1.0 for best results. Assumes that the incoming spline contains multiple splines.

The terms in MCG are mix of C# and Maxscript.
For example, MCG called the position of vertices as “MeshVertices” instead of VertexPosition because that’s what Maxscript uses.

As of now, MCG doesn’t have much of mid level functions like Maxscript.
So, you can’t just “convert” you Maxscript as MCG.
Also the fact that MCG is the functional programming language and node based requires a little bit different approach or thinking for MCG.