yes… as you remember i was a bit skeptic about MCG perspectives. but i’ve looked more deeply in the subject and found the MCG things are not really bad. more… i found them cool.
but i’ve searched all known me resources and couldn’t find any practically used tool made with the MCG.
the main idea of MCG was SHARINGABILITY. where is a cool stuff? private?
Facebook is the most active place.
ScriptSpot also have MCG section.
I have a few. It is not fancy but practical.
www.cganimator.com
They actually have used for production.
Chris has some good blog posts.
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/chris
Elara Systems has also released some of their mcg tools with videos on their site here: http://www.elarasystems.com/insights/case-studies/elara-labs/ .
-Eric
this is exactly not the subject of my question. i see a lot of tutorials and examples those prove how the MCG is cool. ok. i believe it now. it’s cool.
but… does anyone use it? i can’t find an example.
I been using in production for quite some time, just can’t show :(.
that was a part of my original question.
which meant in other words: is a cool MCG private only? as well as most all new shared scripts are encrypted…
ok… cool shouldn’t mean free. never mind.
just tell us, please, what your production tools do, and why you did it with the MCG (not mxs, not sdk)
Well… some of mine have been used.
Lets see my SW Collapse
I did with MCG because it was so easy with MCG.
I can not do any C++. I don’t know MXS enough to make the same thing.
It took hours or so to get MCG.
I did not need to worry about UI and MCG automatically exposed all parameters to MXS.
My MatIDSwap could be done with MXS.
But, I wanted to have as a modifier.
I don’t know how to make scripted modifier.
MCG was just easier to make.
At work, one of artist make a modifier for changing tire shape when it touches ground.
He does not even know any scripting.
It is cool? Maybe not. But, now we are doing something that we could not do.
Ok. I’m not using it so far because I’m thinking much differently. Basically in a coder way, and not in nodes. So for myself it’s a little difficult to understand the working methodology behind MCG. Maybe I shoud learn more about MCG and then I could make awesome things. Other problem is that you need an exact goal, otherwise it’s pointless.
Like pFlow. If theres is a goal, you can reach it with pflow, but if there isn’t any reason, you probably won’t use it.
I agree that it might look inefficient or foreign if you are a good coder.
I think that is general characteristic of nodal system.
For some people, it is natural fit.
For some people, it is superfluous eye candy.
I also agree about goal.
I made All my MGCs because I needed it.
One thing I want to emphasize is that you might need MCG over MXS for performance reason.
I know as of now MCG is not faster. But, I’m sure it will get faster when dev start to optimize it.
I don’t really think that it is possible to optimize it further. MCG has been written in c#, and since the data exchange is made by MXS it will never be faster. Maybe basic calculation can be faster, like octal tree calculations or else, but as I have written the data conversion slows down everythinh, and that is greatest bottleneck of MCG.
It is true that data conversion is the greatest bottleneck of MCG.
I don’t know it is C++ or C# that handles data exchange.
But, the data exchange is not handled by Maxscript for sure.
MCG uses Maxscript only for UI generation and event handling.
I think there are a lot of room for optimization.
For example, As of now, even though you only modified vertices, MCG modifier reassembles the entire mesh and give back to modifier stack. Max itself has a mechanism to update only needed data. If MCG utilize that MCG modifier can be significantly faster since it will reduce the amount of data which need to be transfer.
I have no doubt that MCG will be faster than MXS in the future.
Hmm I had replied to this but maybe I didn’t press ‘Reply’
Scriptspot has an MCG section now, there are an increasing number on there, the official MCG Facebook page has quite a lot going on at the moment, Vu is writing loads of tools.
I’ve got a few in the works, I’ve released a couple and got a few in the pipeline which I can’t show until EXT2 comes out
Mine are fairly simple, a Math Controller which allows simple math work with Floats in the Slate Material Editor. I’ve made an ‘Object Flicker’ which takes a list of meshes and you can switch between them with a slider and animate this. I made a really cool Hierachy Combine tool. Some of these you can only see on the MCG Facebook page at the moment as I haven’t quite finished them, but I’ve got a long flight coming up next weekend so I’ll try and sort them all out.
I plan to make all my MCG tools public, there’s no point people repeating the tools and needing many many versions for compatibility reasons.
I’ve got a list of things I’m trying to do with MCG at the moment, some of which I’ve managed really easily and some are a bit more taxing, I’ve found a few roadblocks which I’ve reported to Autodesk as feature requests and there’s a general consensus that some new useful max bits need to be developed, for instance when allowing dynamic joining of objects the material IDs need to be merged in a way which means the materials are handled automatically, so a dynamic multi-material or multi-mesh-material is needed to solve this problem.
I know of quite a few studios who have just recently adopted 2016, it seems a good release with a good up-take so the MCG tools will slowly leak out.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/mcg
I’ve only put one on here so far, I’ll put a few more on this week!