max -> maya plugin port

[Anonymous]

Apologies for cross-posting in the max forum also, but I figured I should ask in both worlds.

I have been tasked with porting a large max cloth sim plugin to maya.  I'm familiar with the maya API, but not max's.  Are there any guides or tips on porting plugins from one application to the other? Or just a guide to equivalent classes and concepts in the two?

Thanks for any guidance you may have.

[kevinvandecar]

Hi, Well, the simple answer is ‘no’. I have never seen any porting help between Max and Maya. The two sides are fairly different. On the Max side, cloth may be implemented using the Modifier class type (the built-in cloth is this way anyway). In that case, depending on how it is implemented, the main deformation logic would likely be in the Deform derived class (for a SimpleMod2 derived modifier ), or if derived directly from Modifier class, it would be in the ModifyObject method.
hope it helps,

kevin

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your thoughts.  I think you're probably right, and it's helpful to get confirmation that there isn't much information out there for porting between these applications.

As it turns out, the max plugins were not being used to simulate the cloth (even though the sim engine code was in there! Arrrg.), it was just used for setup, and they instead were using an external viewer to do the sim.  So I'm just reproducing in maya the behavior we need from the ui, and the file I/O.  This can all be in python, so it's greatly simplified the whole task.