As a MAX user, you have one of the greatest advantages over users of other 3D software-the ability to expand.
Through the use of the plug-in technology built into MAX, you can extend, enhance, or add features to the base product.
Although MAX is capable of doing many things, some areas of the software could be enhanced or replaced by a good plug-in.
Believe it or not, MAX is actually made up of plug-ins.
There is a central program called the core and everything else is essentially plug-ins.
With your 3D Application, you can now see plug-ins initializing in the startup or splash screen.
Along the bottom of the splash screen, you should see "Initializing...
".
As plug-ins are initialized, their names appear.
This process occurs rather quickly.
What's happening here is that MAX is looking for plug-ins, but not necessarily loading them into RAM.
MAX wants to know what's available so it can present it to you, the user, when the main interface appears.
it is not until you try to use the plug-in does MAX actually load it into memory fully.
The end result is memory usage only when MAX needs it.
Although this is not a plug-in tip, you can change MAX's start up screen by renaming any BMP file splash.
bmp and placing it in the root MAX directory.
Just make sure it is small enough to see the rest of the Windows interface! MAX's plug-ins show up as DLL files within your plug-ins directory as well as anywhere else you might place them on your hard drive.
(DLL stands for Dynamic Load Library.
) Plug-ins, depending on their type, will have a different last letter (at least) in the extension.