To answer DennisT, I used it because of time constrains, and ease of testing. So I did a custom morpher with clone abilties, lots of material ids tools (i did convert some of my c++ modifiers to mcg for performance testing), selection tools, some controllers modifiers, procedural custom objects, and some more I don’t remember.
As for encryption of the tools, right now there is none, so any shared MCG is always open to see how it works. Data exchange is done at the paramblock level not at the mxs level, so yes there is a bottleneck in mesh conversions (that is also not done at the mxs level, its in C# code, that converts a multithreaded mesh structure to the native trimesh), but things are way way better now, and should be even better, probably comparable to native modifiers.
Maxscript works just as the plugin “holder” for mcg, defining the paramblock for the objects/modifiers/controllers, managing the UI, classId’s and all the stuff required to define a 3dsmax plugin.
Vu is coming up with some very cool things… this is pretty powerful!
Just using my first MCG Modifier in production.
Takes a softselection input and raycasts to a designated geometry, multiplying ray position with weight. Basically “sticks” a mesh selection to another mesh with fallof support. Using it for a medical animation. Speed is okay, not super high res mesh. I do find weird errors when using parallelMap instead of Map in my application. Not sure yet, but I will try to track the problem down. Using map for now.
It really starts to make sense pushing the arrays around, though I don’t like how certain data flows, and the caching mechanism is really something else. Also documentation is way to sparse.
-Johan
When using any of the Parallel operators, try to cache or bind any INode result (like transforms or trimesh) that may go into them, even if just between tool calls (depth of 1), because it may make 3dsmax weird, like no viewport updates, modifier stack “lost”, or some crashes, but this is due to 3dsmax not being thread safe in general.
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max/3ds-max-2016-extension-2
MCG now supports splines…
I haven’t really looked into MCG yet, but how capable is it?
Would something like a realtime boolean modifier be possible?