3dsmax plugins load/deferred

Is there a way to exclude plugins from loading on Max startup (like Maya’s plug-in manager) other than deleting/renaming them on the stdplugs directory? On Max’s Plug-In Manager interface you can only load deferred plug-ins, but not change any sort of settings if it should be loaded or not or just deferred. There doesn’t seem to be any .ini for to configure a “plugins list” also.

We are looking to speed up the build process and we really don’t need stuff like mental ray, hair, reactor, openexr, etc.

The load status of a plugin is configured in the source code to the plugin. So you could make your own in-house plugins deferred, but that would be it.

Have you timed how long it takes Max to start with a full complement of plugins vs how long it takes if you delete the plugins you don’t want? My guess is the savings will not be large enough to justify the time investment trying to figure out some hack in order to remove/defer them.

Thanks Jeff, and indeed you are right. Taking out some 100mb of plugins (hair, mental ray, reactor, etc) doesn’t change much. I couldn’t really try it out in perfect “scientific” conditions but it still takes some 40 to 50 seconds to open Max2011 with either all plugins or not…

Hi,

we - me - use seperate ini Files depending on the job. But its also an malicious work…
Think about since a couple of month in writing an PluginManager…
If so, I’ll let you know.