Wolfram is fine for a reference, but I don’t know how easy it is to digest as a guide. You probably want some decent books for that. Maybe something …

You probably want to use arrays to store variable amounts of user data. Variables are maxscript internals, and probably shouldn’t be exposed to the us…

Let me just add to that by telling the SDK team to follow those same practises. Does the latest SDK compile cleanly under /W4 yet? The code samples do…

Perhaps because when you have many objects you run out of physical memory (since string-streams are memory buffers) and so the system starts paging. P…

I’ve found that you can significantly increase performance by buffering your writes to a stringstream, then writing to the file once (or fewer times)….

Native code tends to make it go faster (i.e. using the C++ SDK), presumably since you don’t incur overhead from the maxscript interpreter. Other than …

If mental ray isn’t releasing the memory it’s using after renders, and allocating new memory each render, then it’s a horrible memory leak in MR that …

Oh, I agree entirely, the documentation needs a lot of work. Both in terms of accuracy, and more importantly, quantity. Many things are undocumented, …

The other thing that Express lacks is a visual resource editor. Though it’s possible to use a 3rd party one, I guess. You’ll need a resource editor w…

I’d suggest against continuously polling – instead, set a flag when the key is pressed, and unset it when it’s released. Polling is bad.

He was probably looking in the max reference, as opposed to the maxscript reference…

Ah, well, in that case it seems he’d need to write a mental ray shader using the MR api, and then follow those samples to provide a front-end for max….

Bercon, have you looked in MAXSDK{HowTo,Samples}\mentalray\ ? There seems to be a number of samples available. I’ve never actually looked at them, ha…

Why PM? I’d prefer a public discussion so others can benefit. The SDK documentation sucks enough as is.