Hi everyone,
Our current 3ds Max integration, powered by the tk-3dsmaxplus engine, is done with an API named MaxPlus. As you may have noticed, the 3ds Max team has recently made the decision to only support the pymxs API in Python 3. As a result of this, we’ve had to shift the development of our 3ds Max integration to the pymxs API, which is available in both Python 2 and 3. This means that moving forward, the any new feature work will only be done in the tk-3dsmax engine. The tk-3dsmax engine is not the same as the Blur Python implementation we had years ago. This is a completely new engine based on the existing functionality found in tk-3dsmaxplus , but now implemented with pymxs.
If you signed up for a Shotgun site on March 10, 2020 or after, it is already configured to use the new engine and no change is required on your part.
For those of you who are not ready to switch, we’ll keep providing bug fixes to the tk-3dsmaxplus engine and the associated hooks until September 10, 2020. After this date, while the code will still be functional, we won’t be providing any updates.
For users who are ready to update their configurations and Shotgun site to migrate to the new engine, we’ve written a detailed migration guide that will help your team migrate.
Any custom hooks that have been written by your team will need to be reviewed to use the pymxs API instead to support them in Python 3. We recommend you take a look at the default hooks Toolkit provides to get an idea of the changes your team will need to do. In our experience, we found that most of the changes we needed to make were one to one changes. If you wish to learn more about pymxs, you can read about it here.
Please reach out if you have any questions about this transition.
JF