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[Closed] Generating thumbnails

Maxers!,
I am writing a quick script to generate thumbnails. We have a huge vault of models and I need to generate quick thumbnails of each model and save the renders in a directory one above each folder.

Here is my current process of attack:

  1. Make a template file including camera, light, ground plane
  2. Merge in the geometry from the vault model and group everything
  3. Align the ground plane’s z axis with the .min value of the group
  4. Render and save

Some things I’m thinking would go wrong.
1> if the object is very large the light might not hit some of it, possibly workaround overshooting the light

This doesn’t have to be perfect, but I would like quick renders of each model so we know what they are. Any ideas on how you would do something like this?

-Colin

1 Reply

Why bother with lights at all? You coudl just let max use it’s default lighting.

Also, if you don’t want to render everything, I’m pretty sure in the help there’s an example of how to grab the viewport – search for getViewportDib().

I might do something like this:

viewport.setTM() – set the viewport to a nice perspective view
max zoom extants all – zoom out
saveViewport() – wrap getViewportDib() into something usable that saves the file as well