Experiences with Interaction between Grasshopper AND 3ds Max, Maya OR Houdini???

I´m working with Max for about three month.

This is absolute beginners level but it´s at least three month.

Unfortunately I´m starting to worry that Max is not the best application to interact with Rhino/Grasshopper.

One point is that Max is far away from being a nurbs modeler.

One other little point is that you can go through the grashopper-discussions and it seems that its a bigger topic to use Grasshopper together with MAYA!

Just look at the "Maya Particle imorter for Grasshopper" and "Maya Fluid to Grashopper...

To keep it short: I´m not shure if I´s advisable to keep going on with Max in my situation.

So I would be very interested if anybody has experiences in this subject!

I´m excited to hear from you!!!!!

Greetings

Gerd

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Brent Watanabe on September 23, 2010 at 11:40am

you're using max for modeling or just for rendering?

Permalink Reply by Gerd Fechter on September 23, 2010 at 2:21pm

I will use it for modeling. I replied to Daniel Piker with a detailed description plans!

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on September 23, 2010 at 11:56am

I find it's generally much simpler to work in a single software if at all possible.

What do you want to do that you can't already do natively in GH ?

Permalink Reply by Gerd Fechter on September 23, 2010 at 2:18pm

I search for a way to bring some kind of physics into my form finding process.

Just to give an example:
Imagine you want to crate a model that shows the moment of a car that is crashing into another one.
Or you want model something like a flag that is waving in the wind - sounds stupid but is an good example.

You can say it´s all about the the bizarre forms that are resulting when concrete material is being deformed by physical forces.

You can animate such forms with Max, Maya or Houdini - no problem!
But if you want to rebuild it - imagine you want to build something like a sculpture of a crashed car -
you need some application that is made for manufacturing - like Rhino.
I need one program for the animation and one for te manufacturing.

Permalink Reply by Jonah Hawk on July 9, 2012 at 1:16am

I've used max for years. There is a lot you can do without using the sdk. As with Maya/Mel, Max has a scripting language that is pretty robust.

This is not a particle example but it's Max and GH exchanging data in near real time.

http://www.jonahhawk.com/2011/09/grasshopper-to-3dsmax-and-back/

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on September 23, 2010 at 12:36pm

It all depends on how you transmit the data. For Maya, my friend wrote a UDP connection that sends particles / fluid data that we can capture with gHowl and use in GH. I am sure the same could be written for Max.

Permalink Reply by Gerd Fechter on September 23, 2010 at 2:17pm

Yes, I saw those particle imports & exports and I wished that there was something like this for max.
To be honest these particle import/exports you mentioned are one of the reasons that made me thinking that Maya is a topic in the grasshopper comunity
I was getting the feeling that with Max I have been betting on the wrong horse because nobody seems to deal with max in conjunction with grasshopper.

PS
if you are interested in my intentions: I tried to discribe them in one of the posts above!

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on September 23, 2010 at 2:38pm

Well, through the 3D Studio SDK I am sure its possible, but you will have to find someone with experience there to make sure. Check around the Max forums...they mught be able to give you a better ide of how to interface with UDP or other protocols. For example, can you find out how to save out a text file from Max? This might be a starting point...you might find a script that does this already...

I just use Maya because its what I have experience with...I left 3D studio SDK behind a while ago (with version 4!) ...though I still regard it as a useful program.

Permalink Reply by Gerd Fechter on September 23, 2010 at 4:08pm

thanks a lot for your quick answering.

if i will come to any fruitful issues i´m shure that i will post them anywhere here.
i just can say that it will take some time - i have to get confortable with the max at first.

greetings
gerd

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