Blender Shader Exporter

This plugin includes a Blender addon that can be used to export Cycles shaders directly from Blender.

Note: The exporter is only supported with Blender 2.83 through 2.93. It may work on other versions but has not been tested.

Installation

To install the plugin, check the box for "Blender Shader Exporter" during installation. This will copy the addon file into your Blender install directory.

After the addon has been installed, you will need to enable it in Blender. To do this, open the File menu and select 'User Preferences...', then go to the 'Add-ons' tab. In the Add-ons tab, click the checkbox to enable Export for Cycles for Max shader. You can type 'max' in the search box to make this entry easier to find in the list.

Manual Installation

If the installer is unable to find Blender on your computer, it will ask you where the addon should be installed. In this case, it will copy a file named io_cyclesmax_shader.py to the destination you select. You will need to copy this file to (Blender Directory)\(version)\scripts\addons\. For a default install of Blender 2.93, this will be C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.93\2.93\scripts\addons\.

Exporting a Shader

With the addon enabled, you can now export a shader. Select an object with the shader you would like to export, then go to File -> Export -> Cycles for Max Shader (.shader). This shader file can then be loaded into a Cycles Shader Graph material in Max.

Note that this addon currently supports most cycles shader nodes, but not all of them. If the exporter finds a type of node it does not support then a warning will be displayed. The shader will still export ignoring all nodes of unsupported types.

A video demonstrating this process is available on youtube here.