Roadmap for 2018
It has been a while since I have posted a roadmap, so here is a short summary of the features I plan on adding to this plugin before the 1.0 release. If all goes well, I should be able to finally get 1.0 out later this year.
Node Graph Editor Updates
Right now I am largely focused on improving the node graph editor. This consists of adding support for (almost) all of the Cycles nodes that are not in this plugin yet, including Object Info, Geometry, Wireframe, and more. I have also been working on some minor UI improvements including a new RGB color picker.
I expect a to make a release including these improvements near the end of January.
Shader interop plugin for Blender
Once the node graph editor has more complete support for all of the node types in Cycles, I will write a plugin for Blender that allows a user to import and export shaders in a format compatible with the Max plugin. This will allow you to easily send any Cycles shader created in Blender to Max and vice-versa.
Creating this plugin will be my top priority once the graph editor improvements detailed above have been released.
Shadow Catcher
This feature is a recent addition to Cycles that will be supported by this plugin in a future release.
More Lights
The plugin currently has very limited support for lights. I'll be adding support for more of Max's built-in light types including directional lights and spot lights.
Along with these new light types, I will also be adding support for light portals.
Physical Material
The approximation of Max's Physical Material currently used by this plugin has a few areas I hope to improve.
First, the current method used to convert the material's height map to a normal map can produce quite bad-looking results with some height maps. Instead of continuing with the current method of converting from height map to normal map inside of a shader at render-time, I plan on extending the texture baker to allow it to bake out a high quality normal map from a height map as part of the texture-baking phase.
Second, a number of parameters of the Physical Material are still unsupported. The approximation used by this plugin will be improved to support anisotropy, subsurface scattering, thin-walled transparency, and possibly cutout maps.
Render Passes/Elements
I will be adding support for using Cycles Render Passes as Render Elements in Max.
OpenCL
The plugin will be updated to support OpenCL for AMD users. This is near the bottom of my list for development priority right now, but I do want to get OpenCL support in before version 1.0
Maybe More
If there are any other features of either Max or Cycles that you would like to see the plugin support, let me know either in a comment below or by email at contact@cyclesformax.net
Posted Jan. 22, 2018
May God bless you and your efforts on this plugin. Autodesk 3ds max has stopped cooperation with Mental Ray and went on to Arnold which is SUPER slow even with simple SCENES!.
Your plugin is MUCH faster and I can reduce more noise.
Posted by Tang on Jan. 24, 2018, 12:43 a.m.