Nodejoe @ $450 USD...

[JeffG2]

Nodejoe goes 1.0 and has a price tag of $450 USD.

Seems pretty steep for a material editor.

It's a great plugin, but....... $450? Sheesh!

Anyone know of any good alternative material editors???

http://www.nodejoe.com/get_nodejoe_en.php

[trick]

You probably have to ask yourself how much easier it makes your workflow. I love it and its worth every penny. Although if you don't make complex materials and pick them for a major part from your libraries you may not need it. Although you can get good insight in how materials are connected with instanced parameters: if you have animation on these NJ can be a big relief !! I can also say that these guys offer the best support: if you have a problem they keep working until its solved !! Another thing is that developers are from EU so things can get expensive in $$ !! Actually strange since Europeans have to pay a relatively way higher price for Autodesk, Adobe and a lot of other products !!

[xenry]

I personally use SME and am pretty happy with it =)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=500501

[dlparisi]

I personally use SME and am pretty happy with it =)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=500501

Does it work with vray materials?

[JeffG2]

Regarding SME:

" I'm not planning to continue the development of SME at this point. Here is why:

- Maxscript is too limited, the connection with medit is always going to be poor, no matter what I do.

- I'm not developer of Helium and so I can't add any new features to it which would be required to add most of the features you mentioned.

- NodeJoe is probably better, since its done with SDK and like thorsten hartmann mentioned, its now 1.0. If you want fully functional node based material editor its a better choice.

- I have other personal projects and school to attend to."

[JeffG2]

Does it work with vray materials?

Yes it does

[Neilg]

" I'm not planning to continue the development of SME at this point. Here is why:

Does he need to though? It works.

That price for nodejoe is absurd though, I know its good and all but it's nothing special - maya and XSI both have comparable editors.

[ene.xis]

for that price u can even buy xsi foundation...how absurd is that?

[jonahhawk]

I love Node Joe. It helps me think and be creative with materials in new ways all the time. It is worth it! I can solve material issues so much faster when I can see ALL of the maps at once.

I was looking at xsi also which has great node based editing. But the learning curve is just not worth it to me. At this point, time is more valuable than money!

Next I really, really, really want a node based editor for wire parameters in Max. I want controllers and every parameter available in a node view. Schematic view in Max is a crude start but is extremely limited.

Anyone know of something along this idea for Max?

[DrJan]

I've heard things about Mental Images' Mill being implemented in "a" new version of Max. Apparently Zap Andersson was involved in the development process.
But what version that will be.... I have no idea.

I liked NodeJoe as well, and even had some suggestions which were implemented, but I think it's too expensive for a software package like that.
I would really like to get my hands on a similar material editor.

[Neilg]

I would really like to get my hands on a similar material editor.

xenry posted one earlier.



"Installer (executable) for all max versions: http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylilamm/sme/sme_1_0.exe
Simple zipped versions (extract to max root folder): http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~jylilamm/sme/instal/

Features:
- Schematic/Node based material editor
- Customizable user interface
- Automatically arranges nodes in sensible way
- Hides all unnecessary submaterial/map slots
- Controls to easily hide/unhide nodes
- Ability to handle multiple schematic views
- Support for 3rd party material and maps
- Support for controllers (Color, Float, Script etc.)
- Advanced Math and Channel nodes for complex material and map setups
- Materials and maps are fully compatible with systems without Schematic Material Editor installed
- Scenes saved with Schematic Material Editor info can be opened even without it installed
- Material and maps are stored inside Schematic Material Editor so they aren't lost even if not present in Material Editor or Scene "

[JeffG2]

Good news about NodeJoe Pricing...

http://www.nodejoe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=628

"Hi Folks,

thanks for your statements concerning the price of NodeJoe.

The price thing is a difficult thing to manage and I agree with both of you.
Because of the very bad exchange rate of dollar to euro the dollar price for NodeJoe has increased to much now, thats not acceptable.
We are currently busy with the MAX2009 adaption, but when this is done we will make an adjustment of the price.

Our imagination of a fair price would correspond to the cheeseburger-model(like written on cgtalk).

If for example NodeJoe is worth 289 cheeseburgers, then everyone should pay the amount of money in his country currency with which he can buy 289 cheeseburgers. But to manage this for every country is nearly impossible, but I can promise you, that we'll do something with the dollar price.

For volume license requests, there are of course discounts."

[Neilg]

His cheesburger analogy makes me cringe, haha. Good work on talking down to people like theyre children.

I dont really care about the exchange rate though - it's straight up too expensive no matter how you adjust it, or where you are.

[DrJan]

I dont really care about the exchange rate though - it's straight up too expensive no matter how you adjust it, or where you are.

QFT!
I'm using Bercon's SME now, which looks damn good. There are some things that could be adjusted but I think it's already great for a home-made thing.

[trixian]

Though I would say it is a tad on the expensive side (not too bad for us here in Norway), I'd go so far as to say it is well worth it. I'd still buy it if it costed more, knowing how good it is.

The power it gives you over the regular max mat-editor is just incredible, and the inclusion of controller nodes makes it a must have for animation work.

Having said that, I must confess I have not tried SME since early beta, and back then it was not very good, or stable.

The only downside with NodeJoe is; now I tend to make so complex shader trees, that I confuse my self when I open them up for editing\tweaks later on.
Also, the connection lines are very basic, so they end up criss-crossing everywhere when you start optimizing the shaders with instances and shared controllers.