Most of them use Embree Raycasting and either involve selections (and soft selections) or vertex colors, also some clever use of texmaps but not that much. Also some deformation/morphing, but those are slow (on high poly mesh) and I already annoyed the max devs about this, since there are too many mesh conversions involved.
that’s the thing…
technically MCG milks two… the Embree and new mesh plugin (simpleMeshMod).
the second one is the KEY. i got it ten years ago, and wrote this type. the plugin is the thing that sits on a mesh (and doesn’t change the type!) and notifies only about geometry or topology changes. ideally it has to tell what exactly was changed.
another one is the Embree
the Embree is like a postman who exactly knows how far from his office to your house. the max simply asks and gets the answer…
but if you are not the Emdree’s friend you have to go to the post office, step and measure it yourself.
Dennis here is the list of Nodes in video format ;). I speedup the search and then show some of the relevant node categories.
btw… it’s the hit at Nitrous.
Nitrous technically could be that postman. it exactly knows everything about raycost mesh.
Html generated help for the nodes and just the list, both attached to this post.
Yup, I agree with you Dennis, this “new” mxs plugin, should do that, the problem relies in that the MCG does mesh conversions (for parallel computation safety), and so the update is not done as in C++, so instead of having just the right mesh channels getting updated, all channels are updated (and the entire buffer, not just the changed part).
thanks, dgsantana
now we can see how many nodes MCG already has. there are more than 3200 nodes.
is it a big number? yes. it’s pretty big. for example ALL functions in the mxs including functions from ALL interfaces and built-in structures are ~3200
so the learning curve of MCG is compatible to the mxs learning curve. how can it be easier for an average artist?
You are right, and I don’t think this is for the average user. Its more for TD/TA, at most, artists can change a few nodes/connections to make something different, but learning MCG is like learning VEX or ICE.
Data type is visible. (You cannot connect different data types together. ) There is no syntax to learn.
Just imagine what would happen if a material would be similiar to mxs. (Programmaing the material instead of just putting nodes together…)
I think this example shows you why it is good. (Of course if something is new, than you have to learn if if you want to use it.) But using something means experience, and more experience means more knowledge…
There are some interesting things happening around the .Net platform lately:
Next Gen JIT Compiler:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2013/09/30/ryujit-the-next-generation-jit-compiler.aspx
SIMD for .Net
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/07/the-jit-finally-proposed-jit-and-simd-are-getting-married.aspx
Native compilation through C++ Backend compiler:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dotnetnative.aspx
Will we finally being able to get rid of C++ as development platform?
Only time will tell.
There are over 3200 different types of Lego bricks, so mastering Lego is comparable to mxs?
Some very interesting times for .NET, I’m using since .NET 1.0 (13 years) and MS move to official support Linux, OSX and mobile is also very interesting. Even though I still use other languages for other stuff (C++, Python, Ruby), .NET dev tools and core libraries speed development a lot, and you can also get the speed of C++, if go “unsafe”.
As for the node quantity, well, many are operations like +,/,*,-, dotProduct, crossProduct and so on, and the user doesn’t need to know all of them to build something, and there already a lot of “compounds” (similar to ICE), that save some time, and hide complexity away for novices.