Does anyone know if this is possible?
I want to add constant and lambert shading methods to the max standard material so’s I can look at them in my viewports and also export them to collada via the opencollada exporter.
As far as I know it only supports export of standard materials so I don’t think a scripted material will do the trick.
any ideas?
edit:
I’ve done me some research and I was right - it can’t be done via maxscript.
I’ve dusted visual studio off, opened up the SDK stuff and am now buried ap to my armpits in figuring out how to make a plugin shader.
anybody got any experience in this? I won’t have any problems with the maths for drawing the pictures, it’s the making a plugin part I’m getting stuck on.
cheers 
Would it be easier to extend the plugin or write something that’d export your shader data into the exported collada file?
Generally I always preferred to go around Max to do things properly rather than touch the SDK or make hacks on built in stuff.
That’s the approach we’re going to take i think. extending the standard material is going to be a hack regardless and from today’s experiments it seems it’d still require alterations to the exporter which we can’t do as we need to allow third parties to produce content using standard tools.
The current plan is to build a dx shader that accurately reproduces what our engine draws and then script the export process so’s i can pump the necessary data into the collada files.
Ideally i’d like to handle this as a one click solution but I’ve been having trouble getting my head around the .net xml stuff in maxscript. it doesnt seem to respect the hierarchical nature of xml in the same way my brain does. that’s another thread though…
Alright I’ve done this sort of stuff a bunch so if you need help just start a thread.
ditto poopipe, I am involved in setting this sort of environment up at work at the moment as well, so we can share ideas.
