Hi !
I want to start writing my own basic renderer plugin for max in the next few weeks as a project in my free time. I had a short glimpse into the SDK doc and I have read about the abstract “Renderer” class to be implemented.
Now what I would like to know is if anyone here has done something similar before and has tips concerning some of the topics (e.g. accessing geometry data etc.) or things he/she encountered that may be useful to know. I have basically quite little knowledge about MAX’s API and – knowing Maya’s API – I am a little afraid that MAX’s design will not be as clean as Maya’s… any help here would be greatly appreciated. It would be ideal to just extract polygonal data at first. I am also unsure whether I will be exporting to an external ASCII file (similar to .RIB) and rendering that. Maybe this will make sense at first before incorporating the renderer directly into MAX. Would it make sense to look at some exporter plugin examples to see how to get hold of geometry data ?
I also wonder if there are any basic frameworks for a MAX renderer plugin available freely on the web, so one can mainly concentrate on the rendering algorithm instead of struggling with Api Functions. It is just that I want to get to know MAX’s API better so this would be a great exercise (but tedious as well yeah I know that ).
bobos latest Matrix cd tutorial has a scripted renderer example in it if this helps…
Look in the max sdk at:
maxsdk\howto\render\cjrender
It is a renderer that is a demonstration renderer only. Basicly as far as I know it only shows you how to plug into the max sdk.
hotknife, as I am not going for a scripted raytracer I think Bobos DVD will not be very useful. But thanx anyways !
AlpineMan, is this for MAX 8 ? Because I have only got 7 and there is no such folder in my sdk dir. But maybe I will update soon…
You have to have the max sdk installed. It comes with the disk.
Chris J.
Yeah sure. I have the sdk installed but I have got version 7 and there is no cjrender folder. My question was if you had MAX 8 because that would explain why I could not find this piece of code in my sdk folders.
edit: Ups, got it ! it was under “maxsdk\samples\render\cjrender” and not under “howto”. But it doesn’t matter. I am happy to have a framework now !! Thank you for the hint, AlpineMan !