Using Arnold plugins within 3ds max

[Anonymous]

Hello everone,

I am investigating possibilities to use Arnold plugins when Arnold is being used as renderer in 3ds max. I am not familar with 3ds max in particular but with C++ and other rendering software.

Basically, I would need to write a plugin for Arnold which would involve a custom camer node that influences ray cast behavior during rendering. Rays would be slightly modified. This is not about shaders or material behaviors.

Suppose I can create such a plugin for Arnold and it does what I need. My question is, would I then be able to use Arnold _with_ this plugin active when using Arnold in 3ds max?

I could not find any hints in the 3ds max plugin API that would allow me to influence ray cast behavior in here. Is that correct? And if so, can I still control Arnold's behavior to that effect? With or without a 3ds max plugin which could theoretically enable this?

Thanks for any advise on this.

Best regards...

Stephan

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

lentil includes a custom Arnold camera, and you can use it in 3ds Max

You just put the lentil DLL in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2022\ApplicationPlugins\MAXtoA
or any other folder, and point to that with ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH

[Anonymous]

Hello Stephen,

yes, that looks similar to what I intend to do. A promising start. But given that example, how would the Arnold in use by 3ds max 'know' that it should pull in and indeed activate that plugin?

Surely Arnold won't open and activate any plugin that happens to be in that path now, would it?