Max 2013 support

[ogdgs]

Max 2013 landed on my desk this morning. We don’t normally adopt new versions of Max in a hurry, but this one has some features that will be very useful in our production. So we are keen to adopt as quick as we can.

I know that the SDK has had a huge change in this version, so does that mean that Npower plugins will take some time to support Max 2013?

If you have an ETA for Max 2013 support, that would be great to know.

Thanks

Oliver

[nPower_erik]

Hey Oliver,

The 2013 SDK did have quite a few changes (notably the switch to Unicode) but it shouldn't keep us from releasing something in the next few weeks. Also, if you are in the Subscription program, we did submit a 2013 installer as a part of the 3rd party content. This is only available as a demo but it will give you the chance to try it out.

For now, we are just wrapping up some bug fixing and doing testing. I don't think it will be any later than two weeks.

Erik

[ogdgs]

That’s great new! Thanks!

[ogdgs]

Just so you know, there was a problem installing the plugin downloaded from Autodesk on subscription:

After installation, there was no sign of Npower in the interface. After looking in the plugin manager, I could see that it was looking for a folder called “\plugins\en-US\Npowersoftware”. I checked and this did not exist. So I moved the Npowersoftware folder into a new folder called en-US and now it works.

Great to see that you got the wireframe working properly with Nitrous. That is a huge bonus!

[ogdgs]

Hi

I have done a bit more testing in 2013 and found a few problems:
-Select in viewport
---Can only select wire edges
---Only a problem in nitrous
-Boolean pivot – Old problem since 2010
---The pivot of a booleaned object still moves to the origin after making the boolean
---This is very restrictive as it means you can’t boolean objects after they have been linked to others, else all the linkage shifts….
-Booleaned UVW – Old problem since 2010
---UVW maps added to a boolean in the modifier stack have no effect in render
---Workaround is to add an edit polly modifier in between, but this renders the viewport mesh. In order to get render quality mesh, you have to suffer with very high viewport mesh. Defeating one of the great advantages of Npower…

I know you are probably still working on the final version, so I really hope that these problems are on your list of things to fix. Especially the pivot and UVW problem. We have been waiting a very long time for these fixes….

[nPower_Michael]

Hi,

Thank you for the feedback!

-Select in viewport
---Can only select wire edges

Are you using Shaded mode on that viewport? I think I've run into that issue before when using Shaded, but switching to Realistic seems to work around the issue.

-Boolean pivot – Old problem since 2010
---The pivot of a booleaned object still moves to the origin after making the boolean

We actually added the pivot reset intentionally to work around some issues with animated Booleans (due to a Max API bug where keyframes don't get rotated properly on ChangeParents; unfortunately I doubt this API bug is going to get fixed any time soon). However, I believe we ended up adding a MaxScript command to switch back to the old behavior, so if you don't do any keyframe animation of Booleans, that is probably the way to go.

Michael

[nPower_erik]

Hey ogdgs,

We have spoken about the Pivot issues before in an older post here.

Is that not an option for you?

Erik

[ogdgs]

Yes I remember that. But that was 2 years ago! I am really surprised that is has not been fixed yet. Especially considering that you are now much more closely involved with Autodesk. We can use the workaround occasionally. But as I mentioned, we are linking and animating most of the time. This includes animating Booleans.

I will test Nitrous further and pinpoint the selection problem.

Could you comment on the UVW problem?

[nPower_erik]

Hey Oliver,

Unfortunately, we added the switch for reasons listed in the old forum post and as far as we know, the SDK has not changed.

We are almost finished with a preliminary release for users to try that has licensing enabled. Ideally that will be released this week but we don't like to put exact dates on expected releases because of potential delays.

The changes are mostly in Unicode and they have expanded Nitrous support a bit which is great. We will post when it is available.
That is our primary focus right now so it should be very soon.

Erik

[nPower_Michael]

Quick update on the selection issue: There is a fix in place for an issue that was causing face-picking to fail under Nitrous in [Shaded] viewports. So hopefully the picking issue will be gone in the release.

Yes I remember that. But that was 2 years ago! I am really surprised that is has not been fixed yet. Especially considering that you are now much more closely involved with Autodesk. We can use the workaround occasionally. But as I mentioned, we are linking and animating most of the time. This includes animating Booleans.

Unfortunately, I think we just have to find ways to work around that particular bug. One approach might be to use the Maxscript flag that Erik mentioned, even when you're animating. Then, use a Maxscript to counter-rotate the keyframe transformations back into place after Boolean construction. But this might lead to further issues down the line (there is probably a reason Max doesn't do this automatically anymore; it actually used to, according to the SDK documentation).

Could you comment on the UVW problem?

I am attempting to repro this issue right now. I did find that if I create a simple boolean between two EditNRBs, and then try to insert a Pwr_Unwrap on one of the EditNRB sub-operands through operator parameters, it creates the Unwrap but doesn't show any surfaces in Edit. Is this the issue you are referring to?