I’ve had a lot of e-mail and comments here on the blog about updating my 3DS Max SMD and VTF plug-ins to Max 2012 so I thought I should give you a quick up date. It nothing else it might stop some of the hate mail I’ve actually got over it. Seriously, to quote Wil Wheaton, “Don’t be a dick” – I do this in my free time and share it with you for free.

For anyone who has upgraded to 2012 I hope you kept 2011 installed as well and haven’t saved over your source files. The first release of 2012 is buggy as hell and if you don’t believe me, just check out the list of fixes for Service Pack 1. I seriously pity anyone who dived in with both feet. Even with SP1 people are still having problems, I know Shawn Olson (writer of the Wallworm Model Tools) has been pulling his hair out with the CAT animation system.

Anyway, several of the bugs in the first release directly affected my plug-ins. Some might ask why Canonfodder’s tools weren’t affected – well I’ve never seen his code but I’m guessing I use a different area of the 3DS Max API so he got lucky in that respect. I had a lot of problems with the SMD exporter crashing mysteriously and the importer failing to create anything at all.

So without much here ado, here’s where we are.

• SMD Exporter – Recompiled against Max 2012 SP1 SDK. A few quick test exports seem to be O.K. but I’ve sent it to a few trusted friends to test it more thoroughly. If no big bugs manifest themselves it can go out.
• SMD Exporter – Recompiled against Max 2012 SP1 SDK. A few quick test exports seem to be O.K.
• VTA Exporter – I haven’t had a chance to re-compile it yet but there’s a couple of features that I want to add to it. Autodesk say the method I use to interact with the Morpher modifier is now depreciated and I shouldn’t use it, but the new one is a sample/use-at-your-own-risk. Nice. Thanks for that you $#!”#”%&/!’s
• VTF Importer – The plug-in uses VTFLib and the latest version on Nems’s website doesn’t seem to support the new 7.5 format. I’ve made my own version that supports it but I’m a bit worried about causing conflicts if Nem does update soon.

Other stuff…

• VTFShell Extensions – For Windows Vista/7 I’ve re-written the extension for scratch using the new IThumbnailProvider API interface. Much more proper, much more slick. Needs some refinement and it can go out for testing. Need to resolve the issue of VTFLib not supporting 7.5 yet though.

So please, bear with me. If anyone wants to help me test then drop me an e-mail but keep in mind you’ll be getting possibly buggy, pre-production quality code and I can’t guarantee it won’t destroy your house and everything within a 20km radius.

Responses to “Quick update about Max 2012 plug-ins, et cetera.”