[Closed] The MCG Thread: Post Tools, Compounds and questions here!

MCG is a good news for untechnical people like me. maybe some master feel envy because create tools will be not exclusive anymore.

but i wary that some people think that a juicy pear has just dropped them right in open mouth.

I don’t understand your attitude at all. There are many shades between being “pure myth” and “gifts from heaven”. Nobody sane will fall for marketing speech like “biggest Max ever” and take this literrally. MCG is a major feature, they booted this from ground in one cycle, which is quite an accomplishment.
What follows are some of my impressions, while have’nt played with it much ( ~1h in total, i’m too much of a standard coder, less a graph assembler, at least for such tasks),:

• It’s a bit rough arround the corner, especially UI integration and access of created modifiers
  I see it becoming a problem soon for pure users of those packages who simply install loads and loads of them. Soon they will get a modifier drop down list from hell (don’t know wether they appear in a specific modifier class or not, which would help if you switch your modifier list display to grouped by class ). Naming of those modifiers depend purely on the devs, so this can possibly mean chaos

• As far as i can see ( no real own experience though ) , mesh data modifications on vertex/edge/face array level are slow. Maybe because of the data piping required ( managed to unmanaged? , or whatever ? )
  On the other hand, a vertex color modifier that i played arround with was instantly fast. AFAIK there are caching operators available, so i guess people have still to learn to create the optimal route of nodes

• it’s a ground to build upon. Some subareas seem not to be covered currently ( don’t know and can’t say which exactly ), but they seem to be working on them.

Overall i don’t see any reason why anyone should ditch this effort and accomplishment, even he will not make use of it. Finally, people already doing 90% of Maya have already turned 90% to the dark side mentally

If i see this right: It’s not possible to create instanced objects, isn’t it?
In the end, it is always a mesh created?

I was thinking about a “array tool” as a modifier… Like the old request: http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests/suggestions/4432541-change-array-tool-into-a-non-destructive-cloner

@jedie @gandhics – AFAIK you don’t need to output an MCG as modifier all the time. It can be a tool, a floater which might not collapse the mesh in the end. I’m saying this NOT by personal experience, but by talking to people inside the development of this tool, like Martin Coven.

So, apparently, yes, you can use MCG to create instanced objects instead of a single collapsed mesh, unless it is a modifier.

think this would make a good test for it.

task tessellate/subdivide/smooth while maintaining normals.

my current solution is 2 sdk modifiers NormalsToMap and MapToNormals and any modifier can go inbetween them,.

For those who want a more powerful visual programming language with performance, there’s always Canvas.

https://vimeo.com/121492305

MCG will be far faster then any Max Script solution. I have rebuilt some of my modifiers with it and it is far better.

MCG is an engine written in C# and multi threaded. The flow is stored as XML and compiled when Max loads or the flow is evaluated. The UI for tools is stored as Max script but only the UI not the heavy lifting. All the calculations are taking place in the MCG engine.

Currently MCG only supports geometry, currently

So, many old existing max modifier can be replace with MCG one, so we get all multi threaded?!?