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This engine connects Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit (Sgtk) and Autodesk 3ds Max. Shotgun will appear as a floating menu bar and will place itself in down the bottom of the UI layout at startup.
The Engine currently supports versions 2011, 2012 & 2014* of 3ds Max. These are also the versions officially supported by Blur (see below).
(*) Note: The engine currently supports 2014 when using the Blur Python extensions but does not yet work with the native Python included in 3ds Max as part of the 2014 Extension due to a number of issues that we are working with Autodesk to resolve.
In order to use the Shotgun Toolkit with 3ds Max, you need to have the 3ds Max Blur Python Extensions installed.
- Information about the Blur 3ds Max Python extensions can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/blur-dev/wiki/Py3dsMax.
- The latest downloads can be found on their Sourceforge site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/blur-dev
We currently use BlurOffline_python27_2014-03-20_install_16281_64.exe to test the engine with versions 2011, 2012 & 2014.
While not thoroughly tested, newer versions of Blur's Python extensions have been successfully used with Shotgun Toolkit.
The most common problem reported related to Blur's 3ds Max Python extension is an error dialog on startup reporting a problem loading a "Caddies.gup" file that is part of the standard 3ds Max installation. This is a file that is, by default, patched by Blur's installer. If you come across this problem, the only way around it is to get back to a fresh 3ds Max installation and reinstall Blur's tools with that install option checked off.
It would also be possible to repair an already-broken installation by replacing the following file (assuming a standard 3ds Max 2014 install location) with a copy from another 3ds Max install that has not had its Caddies.gup file patched by the Blur installer:
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2014\stdplugs\Caddies.gup
There is a beta version of the Blur Python Library available that works with 3ds Max 2013 and Python 2.7 (BlurOffline_python27_2013-02-12_install_13312_64) although it is not officially supported by Blur and 2013 support has been dropped from more recent releases.
While the tk-3dsmax engine does run with this version, please be aware that it hasn't been thoroughly QA'd and there may be some instability when using this version. As usual, please report any problems to [email protected].
If Python is running slowly in 3ds Max or if you notice a pause when 3ds Max starts, this is likely to be because of a bug in the SSL libraries that ship with Python up to version 2.7.3 (it is fixed in version 2.7.4). This bug only affects applications which have a significant memory footprint and is therefore not noticeable most of the time. However, with something like 3ds Max it may be a problem.
The solution is to replace the python ssl library with a patched version that contains an
upgraded version of the ssl backend library. You can find the _ssl.pyd file in your Python installation here:
Backup the original file (rename it to something like _ssl.pyd_orig) and then copy the following patched version in to that directory:
- The replacement file to use for Python 2.6 is: Python26/DLLs/_ssl.pyd
- The replacement file to use for Python 2.7 is: Python27/DLLs/_ssl.pyd
Make sure you choose the correct one for your version of Python otherwise it will crash!