I guess this might fall more under the SDK than actual scripting, but I’ll just ask it here.
As it stands right now, when you want to use a new MR shader in Max, you have to exit max, drop the appropriate .mi and .dll files into your shaders and include folders, and then start Max back up again. For the average MR user, this is perfectly fine. However, if you’re trying to debug these shaders, and are going to have to continually be switching a shader in and out, this quickly becomes a royal pain in the ass.
Sure, I have mr standalone at my disposal, in which case I have to setup a scene in Max, export MI files for all of the different camera views I think I’ll need for debugging (which never turn out to be all of the camera views I need), manually edit the .mi files so that mr standalone can render them, and then hopefully remember which camera view I need when doing test renders. This is also a royal pain in the ass.
(Maya shares this same problem)
Head now over to where the grass is greener, with Renderman Pro Artist Tools and SLIM palettes. Within this great little app, I can load up all of my default shaders, manually import as many new shaders as I want, make changes to those shaders, and continually reimport them as many times as I need to. I never need to restart anything, or touch RIB files at all. This “import” feature is one of the absolute most basic and helpful tools in the world of shader writing, but I am yet to find an equivalent for working with MR.
So, if any of you understand some of the inner workings of Max, do you know if it would at all be possible to get this kind of functionality in Max through scripting or any kind of plugin?