After a month of intense development we bring you another milestone is our project- Zookeeper 1.3! We have focused our development on the stability, usability, and, as always, new features. Containers are now supported in schematic views and templates! Moreover all local resources (such as external bitmaps and data) are also available through templates.

We worked on the schematic GUI, improved parts of tree views, fixed many workflow issues, added efficient searching for objects, and included a very useful select and rename tool. In case you want to see more on that there is a good introduction video and a set of tutorials that can help you get started.

We have also been updating and adding to our documentation and plan to post a lot more material in the upcoming month. This is one of the ways that we are improving the experience of our license owners. We are also constantly refining The Zoo and plan to add many more templates soon.

Please note that our introductory/promotional pricing ends in 5 days! So if you would still like to get a 20% discount make sure to get your license before March 15'th. After that the regular pricing takes effect. As usual we are very grateful for your support and for keeping us going! We are looking ahead and another month of heavy development and, as always, getting the little (and BIG) things right.

Zookeeper appears in the latest 3d World issue (127) under "The Filter" section. Look for more on Zookeeper in future 3d World articles.

After some (relatively) intense development version 1.1.9 of Max.NET is here! This is a 'bridge' release before 1.2.0 comes out, which will be another significant milestone in the project. The most notable improvements in this build are:

• Import/Export plugins now load and work fine. Any crashing and dialog issues were fixed.
• Parameter block support! It is now entirely possible to define your parameters using standard 3dsmax parameter blocks. Previously this was very limited since all parameter IO and UI had to be handled manually.
  
  I have outlines some preliminary steps for setting up your parameters in some new docs.
• Automatic UI for parameter blocks For any parameters you define in your parameter blocks Max.NET will generate all the necessary UI if you want it to. It will create spinners for float/int parameters, pick node buttons for node params, color swatches for colors, etc. This should greatly ease development of many kinds of plugins. The steps for using this is described in the aforementioned documentation.

The parameter block implementation is still not complete. Right now only bool, int, float, inode, and rgba parameters are supported (no Tabs, for example). We will be working hard to implementing many more parameter types and their UI for the next build.

I have also started writing up more documentation. This has been lacking in Max.NET so far and we do understand this. Expect many more docs and new videos with the next release!

Please note that Max.NET is only free for non-commercial use. If you would like to inquiry about commercial use licensing please contact us and we will get back to you promptly.

It has been some time since last Max.NET update. As it stands now, R2010 and R2009 versions are at build number 1.1.8 while R9 is older. That is due to the fact that newer builds expose functionality available in Max 2009 and 2010 SDKs such as scene assets and containers. R9 version will be updated once it has significant changes.

We are getting close to 2.0 and we hope that 2.0 will be a major step forward in the framework. It is still uncertain which features will make it in (there are a number of commonly requested features such as full parameter block and auto-ui support, implicit operators for math types such as IPoint3, IMatrix3, etc., and many more) but it will be a significant improvement. So stay tuned!

We have been working hard on bringing you yet another milestone in the Zookeeper project, it is called The Zoo. The Zoo is a web repository of many different procedural templates and assets for use in your scenes through Zookeeper. It is now freely available to all of our current and future customers!

The Zoo is the reason why over the past few weeks we have been concentrating development towards templates and their functionality within Zookeeper. We believe this to be an important feature which could save our customers hours of hard work through readily available parametric highly functional scene asset. Go over them, check out the video, and see for yourself!

Zookeeper 1.2 (now available) boasts a myriad of improvements and additions over 1.1. Some of these include GUI improvements while the majority are improvements related to templates. To make sure that all users get to try The Zoo with Zookeeper's template features we have removed restrictions for template scene nodes. Demo version of Zoo keeper can now import templates from the web the same way fully commercial version does, however, you still need to have the full version to look inside the generated composite nodes. The node limit has also been increased to 10 nodes.

We are planning on growing The Zoo service with new content constantly so check up often and let us know what you think! This is just one of the ways we would like to show our commitment to the Zookeeper project.

If you are interested in Zookeeper please let us know! You can purchase a commercial license before March 15'th at a discounted rate (20% off).