I’m trhilled to be able to finally showcase, at least, some of our very own Python implementation into 3ds Max!
First off, our primary reason for writing our own, proprietary, Python connection to 3ds Max is Tactic by Southpaw Technology. An awesome asset management system entirely written in Python that I decided to invest in and integrate our tools and software packages into. Another reason for this connection, later came up, was the need for writing much more complex scripts with complex GUIs, since, as you probably know, a few functional lines of code are hardly enough in a modern, efficient, VFX production of today. 
The heart of our Python integration is dotNET from Microsoft. I can’t express myself enough how much I appretiate this framework! The brain of our Python integration is IronPython. Also a product from Microsoft, completely open source and free, which are two very important aspects for any pipeline tool in any production facility of any size. Not the price as much as the availability of the software. And with IronPython and Microsoft, I am certain that this piece of software will be around for years!
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I am very excited to present a very early development results for our own Python implementation in 3ds Max.
First a bit of an intro. At duber, I’ve setup everything around Python, the most versatile and powerful language I’ve ever seen. I felt in love with Python so much that it even influenced my decision to leave Fusion (my favourite compositing app) and dive into Nuke (my, now, most favourite compositing app). I even invested in a commercial data and asset management system, Tactic, that is entirely written in Python. I run tons of custom Python scripts to tie together programs such as Tactic, Nuke, FrameCycler, Photoshop etc… etc… But the last missing piece to the entire pipeline puzzle was 3ds Max.
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I bumped into this issue of referencing values inside of Structs, which is a very elegant solution to using variables across your code, while avoiding global declarations. The issue was pretty much that I wasn’t aware of the implementation design of Structs in MAXscript.
Basically, Structs are these overly simplified custom classes know from such languages as Python (to which I’ll try to compare these). However, Structs are really so simple that they don’t even implement such functionality as inheritance (a pitty by the way), or more advanced functionality known from Python. Structs, rather than classes, could be called groups. That’s what I’ve been using them for mainly. I grouped a bunch of functions and called them via a standard attribute reference paradigm.
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Yes! Once again, Blur studio showed how it’s supposed to be done.
They’ve released, or allowed their Eric Hulser to release, an updated version of their blurPython modules for 32bit and 64bit 3ds Max versions from Max 9 all the way up to 2009! And not only that. They’ve also provided libs and modules for tying up Python, 3ds Max and Qt together! This is massive news as I’ve been trying to get Python (concretely IronPython) work in 3ds Max but I’ve been constantly hitting road blocks until I finally bumped into Blur’s updated blurPython.
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I’ve gotten sick of the defaultly setup auto-indentation in MAXScript Pro Editor as I’m too used to the old-school MAXScript editor found in Max prior to 3ds Max 2008. Thankfully, since somebody at Autodesk had the brightest idea of implementing a very well-known and well-used Scintilla based text editor, we’re allowed to tweak and change any of the editor’s settings to our liking!
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After reading a very interesting and helpful article about checksums and how practical they are for comparing large datasets over at Adam Pletcher’s Tech Art Tiki blog, I was immediately interested in such methods as I’m doing some R&D on data management in a larger creative environment and need such a feature. Unfortunately, MAXScript natively doesn’t support MD5 hashes (or any other kinds of hashes), so you’re pretty much stuck with just a few options.
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I’ve been recently doing some R&D on MySQL databases and connection through Python in Maya as well as Python in Max (through blurPython library), but I couldn’t seem to have found a way to connect to a MySQL database via ODBC. The problem lied in OLE methods as they’re not both much documented in MAXScript reference and they’re tied to the operating system, not Max directly. But thankfully, I bumped into a solution today, out of a blue 
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I was trying to solve a problem when I had an object (a point helper) in a scene that was part of a hierarchy (in a rig) but I wanted the object to transform in a different object’s space than was its parent! Essentially, this means transforming objects in “AUX” pivots’ space (if you know MotionBuilder, you know where I’m going with this).
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A friend of mine asked me how I’d go about rigging a wheel so that it spins no matter which direction it travels and stick to a ground as well. At first I thought this’d be a piece of cake as all I really needed was a direction vector and its magnitude to add to the rotation of the wheel. Well, the solution turned out NOT to be that simple in the end.
(the video lags a bit, but the entire rig is actually faster than real-time)
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Have you ever thought that you actually can display a 3D procedural (such as Noise, Cellular etc…) in the 3D space? No? Well, then know that it is possible and it’s nothing difficult. Well, the most difficult part will be what should actually represent the color values. The representation is up to you, but for my experiment, I chose simple point helpers (nulls) of a very small size so that they looked almost like points (vertices would have done as well).
Take a look at this short video capturing the result of modeling a noise procedural:
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