Scripts

Over the last couple of years the development of 3ds Max seems to have slowed down. Nothing new is added only tools that already existed as 3rd party plugins or scripts. So I figure if you wan't something in there you have to build it yourself. Most of the scripts you'll find on this site should be regarded as my wishlist. Although they do work, they are suggestions to some of the features that I want and need. Even if they work well all of them are limited by my quite modest coding abilities. I'm sure that if an actual programmer were to redo them they could be alot more useful. Since I don't know the appropriate way to suggest features to Autodesk (writing them in the crash reports doesn't work :P ) I'll just put them on this site in the form of scripts. If a picture is worth a thousand words then surely a Maxscript must also be worth uhm ...a similar amount of words.

Below is a small sample with more to come :)

Install Notes

Place the files with extension .mcr in your macroscript folder usually "c:/program files/3dsmax/ui/macroscript". Mzp files are simply drag'n'dropped into a 3dsmax viewport and are then copied automatically to the correct locations. (This might actually work with .mcr files aswell, I've never tried)

Draw Animation

I took a break from RenderFlow to write this one. Unlike the other scripts on this page this one is a fun little script to play with. It let's you sketch out animation while the timeline is playing. Simply launch the dialog and press "Start/Stop". On your first leftclick the animation will start playing and then if you just click and drag a new point is created and animated as you move the cursor. On every click-drag a new point is created. The position of the point will be on whatever geometry is under the mouse, to speed up performance you can choose the intersection geometry. For starters play around with this script in an empty scene with just a plane.

Draw Animation

Isolate Selection

This is my favourite and most used script ever. Yes I know there's already one that comes with max, but it's over 600 lines of code and it does soo many things I don't want. Quite frankly it scares me. I tried modifying it to suit my needs but it was too difficult for me, so I wrote my own. Mine is more like 15 lines of code so there's alot less that can go wrong. When run it simply hides all objects that aren't selected and stores them in a selection set called "IsoSelTemporaryHidden". If you run the script again it unhides the selection set. It does nothing else, subselections are maintained, viewport zoom is not altered and no weird buttons are created. Map this to "Alt+q" and you've got that isolate selection toggle that you've (I've) always wanted. Heads up if you have other scripts that read/write selection sets (I've had no problems so far).

Update: Added visual feedback. If you put the script in a toolbar the button will appear pressed when in "Isolation Mode". But you don't have to put it in a toolbar. I got some help on this by Borislav Petrov, thanks for that.

Isolate Selection Improved

Folder Tools, with Preview Launcher

A collection of scripts to keep time spent browsing for files to a minimum. Gives you a number of buttons that each open a selected folder. The max install folder, current project folder, current scene folder, current textures folder, current renders folder, a script that opens the "enu" folder (needs some minor editing to work on your computer). Shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking these buttons do other things, try it out. Remember that for ctrl-clicking to work the ui needs to be "locked" (toggle locked state with alt+0).
The Preview Launcher, launches the latest animation preview, on shift-click it opens the previews folder and on ctrl-click it creates a preview with the latest settings.

Folder Tools

Kill Info Center

When running 3dsmax on a laptop sometimes the fan starts spinning at 100% and won't stop (meaning the cpu load is 100% aswell). I traced the error to a process called "WSCommCntr1.exe", a quick search on the internet reveals that this process is started by infocenter. This macroscript kills this process with no notification, saving battery life and the environment :P Do we really need these problems???

Kill Info Center

Obj Import/Export Extended

This one is a bit of a work in progress. It's a script that wraps the standard obj import/exporter and adds the transformation matrix to the obj-file. This means you can export an object to an obj-file and import it back in with the pivot point in the right place. It's more a proof of concept than anything else, but quite useful when going back and forth from programs such as mudbox. Naturally the other application doesn't include the transformation in the file they create on export but if you add "_lvl1" to the end of the obj-filename the importer will look for an obj-file with the base name and use the tranform from that one instead. For instance "Teapot01.obj" is exported to mudbox subdivided twice and edited. On export you would name the file "Teapot01_lvl2.obj", the importer will then look for a file named "Teapot01.obj" and use it's transform matrix.
I want to make a maya version aswell and generalize the storage of the transform aswell as including a reference to a pointcache file. That would avoid alot of the issues that come with using the fbx format. If you're interested in setting up specifications for an unofficial obj2 format please contact me.
Usage: Click to export, Shift-click to import.

Obj Import/Export Extended