I do a lot of building with scons. One of the most frustrating part of my @ work setup is that it launches 3dsmax during the build process, to convert a .max file to an intermediate representation. This limits me to being on a windows platform to do my builds.

It also means I have to keep a preconfigured copy of max on every machine I will build from.

I have set out to produce an alternative, that I can use easily from scons.

Target Features
1. Written in Python
2. Use XMLRPC to allow client code to be separate from jobserver code.
3. Support basic transformations of the following types: max->ase, png->dds, psd->png
4. Does not require any of the binaries/tools for conversion to be installed on the client machine.

Architecture
1. Client example - a script that makes an XMLRPC call to a jobserver to register a new conversion job. Script is written to be easily converted into a SCons builder.
2. File server - The interaction between client and jobserver is only to setup/start/signal_completion of jobs. The jobserver will provide the client with two directories, an input drop, and an output job, which can be network paths. The file server is just a samba share on the network.
3. Job Server - The jobserver tracks active jobs, indexed by UUID, and for now performs the job itself.
4. Conversion slave - not in current prototype, would be a refactoring of the conversion portion of the jobserver. This would let you have multiple conversions going at once on multiple machines.

Current Status
I have a prototype on github that will happily convert png to dds. It uses nvdxt to do the conversion, and currently does not specify any arguments to nvdxt other than -file and -output. 

I do have an example that converts max 2 ase, but i'm having issues testing it at home, long story. It really just needs some tweaking to the template maxscript.


Source Code
------------
You can check out the source code from github: 
https://github.com/jonnyro/netmax2int

You can also grab a tarball snapshot here:
https://github.com/jonnyro/netmax2int/tarball/master

Collaboration
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If anyone is interested in playing along, especially in updating the template maxscript for max2ase conversion, i'd love your help.