Does max give us the derivative of the mapping? This came up a week ago regarding getting tangents/bitangents in Krakatoa’s Magmaflow so we could scatter PRT instances over an object, and I’m wondering if it would be faster to have that fetched for us, or if we should make some attempt at calculating that ourselves.
I would like this as well.
Speaking of wanting things, one of the other betas I have been on, the developer has a wishlist forum where he tags each post as addressed or not.
Whether that means he says “not possible”, “interesting but too hard in the near future”, “Great idea, will add to the to-do” or “have done this already!”
Would you guys be interested in adding a wishlist forum?
Max doesn’t expose anything like this in its Mesh class that I know of. Which quantities are you actually interested in?
UV first derivatives for me personally.
I guess I’m asking for more specific information. Derivatives of the UVs relative to what?
Surface area or distance? So we know how bunched up the mapping is and what direction it’s running.
In addition to the tangent example I mentioned, you could use it to steer something around on the surface, since otherwise there’s no specific direction for flow.
But now I’m thinking maybe something like DirectX’s ddx/ddy would be useful. Let us get the partial derivative of anything we sample.
Manits (or similar web-based beta bug/wish submission tool) would be cool
Not Another Tool 
We already have a tool we use to track stuff internally, but we are not going to let you access that.
At the same time, we don’t want to duplicate efforts and maintain info in two places.
So for now, use the Wishlist forum on top of the Discussion forum to check what we are tracking.
Post here in Discussion and if something gets accepted for our internal Wishlist, I will reflect it there.