Back when 3dsmax was originally released, freeware plug-ins were few and far between. A small cluster of developers, myself included, leapt on this new 3D software and began producing all sorts of new additions and extensions. My first Ishani-brand site was set up to show off my wares; it was later hosted on max3d.com, a popular 3dsmax news and plug-in review site (where an old version can still be seen, festering on the server since 1997!)
My work on the 3dsmax freeware scene eventually landed me a job working for Kinetix (then Discreet, now Autodesk Multimedia & Entertainment Solutions) where I got to mess with the internals of the product itself, including producing the facial animation blender in R3.0 (Morpher), extending the scripting system, as well as procedural textures for the ArchViz product, VIZ.
I also managed to get involved with a number of books released at the time, especially one written by 3ds guru Jon Bell, "3D Studio MAX R2.5 F/X and Design"...
...a bunch of custom and updated plug-ins were included on the CD and got a chapter about their use.
Any of my plug-ins that were actually of any practical use eventually got wound into 3dsmax in some form or another. A lot of the source code is long gone (this was back before I understood the necessity of good code back-up practices!) but I have versions compiled for 3dsmax 2.0 and 3.0. You can download the whole back catalogue below :
[ Ishani Vintage Plug-ins, R2.0 and R3.0 ]
Later, while at Kinetix, I wrote a bunch of plug-ins exclusively for max 3.0, downloadable below for completeness' sake. Most of the functionality provided has arrived in the core product since then, so I'm not too worried that I don't have max 8.0 versions available!
- CeThru - restore object and material IDs when rendered through transparent surfaces, or modify them to produce effects that change as an object passes behind another.
- Mercury - groovy little feedback-fractal noise generator. Comes with an example material library. Plus it even has it's own screensaver!
- Soft-Selection Painter and Converter - interactively paint soft-selections onto objects with complex brush setups. Converter switches soft selections into hard selections, or polygon selections.
- Gradynt - fully configurable gradient texture map, written back when there was no such thing available for max.
- MtlIDMask - encode material IDs into texture map results without changing their appearance.
- SoundControl for MAXScript - add audio playback commands to the scripting langauge.
- AVISplash - replace the splash screen with a movie file!
- ProgressHook - a UI hack for the Render Effects dialog, putting the interactive update progress into the window title.