Cycles for Max

New Year, New Roadmap

It is January once again, which means it is time for an updated roadmap. Last year I wasn't quite able to finish everything I mentioned in the 2018 roadmap, but I was able to get through most of the list. Here is an updated roadmap for this year that reflects my current priorities for plugin development.

User Forums

A few users have requested some forums on this website and I'm happy to say they will be available very soon. The forums will be a place to ask questions, share tips, request features, report bugs, and share your creations. The forum software is nearly ready now and I expect to launch the forums before the end of January.

Shader Graph Editor Updates

More improvements will be coming to the shader graph editor in the next plugin release. My immediate focus here is to finish adding support for all Cycles nodes, including Color Ramp and Mapping which are currently unsupported.

I also plan on making some workflow improvements to the shader graph editor including support for copy/paste and enhancements to the curve editor UI.

Blender 2.80

Once Blender 2.80 has been released, I'll be updating this plugin to support some of the new Cycles features that come along with it. This may not immediately include every new Cycles feature in 2.80, but I plan to support the new Principled Hair, Principled Volume, and Bevel shaders at the very least.

Updating to parity with Blender 2.80 will also mean the end of support for CUDA renders with some older NVIDIA GPUs. Following this release, CUDA renders will require a GTX 650 or newer GPU. This release will also bring support for RTX 20-series cards.

Lamps and Portals

Currently point and directional lamps are supported in the plugin. In the next year I plan to expand this support to include spot lights and IES lights as well.

I will also be adding support for portals, which should be particularly useful for interior arch-vis style renders.

Denoising

Not a lot to say about this one. Cycles itself includes denoising now and I'll be adding support for using this from within Max.

OpenCL

I've had to push this back a bit as the only AMD GPU I own seems to have died while it was sitting in my drawer, so I can't currently give this feature any proper testing. I'll likely be buying a new AMD card later this year so I can add and test this feature.

More

There will also be some other minor features coming this year including support for Max 2020 whenever it is released. As always, if there is some feature you would like to see that isn't mentioned here please post a comment or send an email to contact@cyclesformax.net

Posted Jan. 7, 2019

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