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Warning re 3ds Max 2019 and BAT4Max

Started by tomvsotis, January 17, 2019, 12:59:08 AM

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tomvsotis

So my wife is currently studying, and as a result, I've managed to get a copy of 3ds Max 2019 through her student ID. Hurrah! Except... apparently NVidia has discontinued the Mental Ray Renderer, which used to come packaged with 3ds Max. This means that that rendering engine is no longer available for the 2019 version, and will no longer be provided going forward. This is a bummer, because it's for that engine that SimFox wrote his BAT4Max scripts, which means that BAT4Max doesn't work with 3ds Max 2019. I'm currently trying to rewrite the scripts for one of the other engines -- this looks like it *should* be do-able, but I'm certainly no expert (I barely know how to use 3ds Max, let alone how to script for it).

In the meantime, I guess the points to note here are:
- If you're running the 2017 version or older and you want to use BAT4Max, don't be a schmuck like me and download the 2019 version;
- Sooner or later, this issue is going to come home to roost. More incentive for developing scripts for Blender, I guess (which has a lovely new version just out!)

vester

Think it was Autodesk that change render to Arnold instead.

Hope you succeed with updating the script.

tomvsotis

Yeah, and as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any documentation about what (if any) of Arnold's parameters are exposed to MaxScript, or how to go about scripting them. It's kind of unbelievable - i mean, at the end of the day, we are hobbyists using MaxScript to make renders for a game we like, but if I was a professional who'd paid good money for 3ds Max and had set up my workflow using MaxScript and Mental Ray, I'd be extremely upset about the whole thing