Hi!
I think it would be very useful to have a generic mesh loader object. This object is limited to static meshes and reads only mesh data, including attributes and channels. Other components like lights, cameras, helpers and materials, etc. are ignored . Supported formats would be MAX, FBX, OBJ, STL, 3DS, USD, glTF, ABC and other formats that can contain nativ mesh data. Vector based formats which need to be translated and meshed first, like STP, IGES or JT are not supported. The object is a live link to the file on disk. Also a caching function will be good to store the data in the maxfile, if wanted. The object should have a function to breakout components (elements) as objects into the scene and organize them in layers. The baseobjects of these objects are allways live links to the loader object. They can be cut off from the loader object by converting them to EditableMesh or EditablePoly. The breakout baseobjects and also the loader object directly, can be modified by all generic mesh modifiers. The naming for layers and objects is based on the name of the loader object plus the names of the objects in the linked file. When you change the filepath and assigned file, the objects will vanish from the scene and be replaced by the objects which are incomming with the new file. The idea is based on the "file" node of Houdini. The goal of this approach is to improve procedural and non-destructive workflows in 3dsmax.
I can imagine a similar approach for a spline loader object, which could have live links to files like PDF, AI, SVG, etc.
Thank you and greetings!
