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[Closed] does .NET SDK or MaxSharp really work?

i’m kinda an old school… i’m developing on c++ and mxs … i’m using c# which helps me a lot with .net

but…

is it really possible to write max modules on c# anyhow?
is c#ing for max development not just only a playing toys today?

4 Replies
 JHN

I believe so, I use c#.net inside maxscript, had some high hopes on maxsharp and python, but that seems to stagnate at this point in time. Also lack of good reference and tutorials doesn’t help it much.

 lo1

Most of my work is based on c#, but I almost never reference Autodesk.Max.dll. the couple of times I tried it, nothing seemed to work.

Instead, I facilitate bindings between c# and max happen via maxscript.

i am asking about possible using of c# instead of c++ working with max system.

So, as you may know, the C# sdk doesn’t allow for inheritance of max base plugins, so you ‘can’t’ make your own built in plugins, nodes, animation controllers, exporters or stuff like that.

The docs actually say:
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-SDK-Programmer-Guide/ :

Can I write a plug-in which overrides classes found in Autodesk.Max.Plugins?
We do not recommend overriding these classes when creating plug-ins. Doing so may cause unexpected results.

Some folks have tried but ran into issues.

So no, as a 1-1 swap for c++ you can’t do everything in c# that you can do in C++ at the moment. I really wish A’desk would put the extra work in to implement the remaining issues here.

I have used it to write p4api.net wrappers, a wpf gui, and mesh/skin serialization, and the big benefits for me are

  1. a dll gets auto wrapped via mxs, so as long as you use basic types for your public methods (in terms of input parameters and return type) mxs will auto convert them for you for no extra work

  2. Speed. It not as fast as c++, of course, but is much faster than mxs for large data sets. My skinIO serialization is around 10X faster than the maxscript one I wrote.

Andy