I’ve really enjoyed working with the community here on cgtalk and spending time with you guys developing tools for 3ds max. I’d love to use this thread as a place where people could post ideas or tool expansion ideas. I’m always looking for new fun tools to create whether it is a widely usable idea, or a fun create crafty simple tool. If any of your guys have ideas, I encourage you to post them for all of us to see. Then depending on which ones seems most interesting I’ll start a thread labeled WLT_“Project Name”
That will be the place in which I’ll document the process and leave it open for everyone to place their input and ideas.
I look forward to hearing some of your ideas…be creative. Let’s create some stuff that hasn’t been done before.
Idea List
[ol]
[li]Eye Object with controls for dilating eye
[/li][/ol]
do you want a real fun and challenge? write new Rollout Creator. make it smarter, more robust, and being able to support dotnet controls.
Denis, I think this is the best idea for now.
Also it would be nice to create Parquet Flooring Tool (like floorGenerator) that will produce patterns like this
i would like to point out a few things first… guess people forgot about http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=98&t=959876
that was a cool project :buttrock:…
especially the PSD to MS – Rapid UI development in photoshop
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6921384&postcount=64
also there is a Visual DotNet Editor made by Martin Dufour…
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=98&t=641366
those 2 should hopefully give you a bump and looking forward to the result
Your suggestion for a “tool” seems a little too vague, in my opinion. What would you mainly like to see? Tools for creating rigs? Primitives? Modifiers? Modeling tools? Whole workflow tools that have multiple scripts? SDK tools? Functions? Its like asking for an idea for a new thread for the main Maxscript and SDK forum. Or to develop an idea for a new scriptspot script. Also there have already been general wishlist threads for max on here before.
Any ideas are worth saying, whether it’s a rig related tool or a modeling related tool.
You should ask in the general 3dsmax forum. Wishes are made by users, not necessarily developers.
True,
Well maybe I’ll move it over to that forum.
I’d just like to hear some ideas of what tools people would like to have whether it’s and object plugin or a modifier…etc. I believe there are so many good ideas out there but not enough people share and communicate with one another to develop these kinds of tools. That’s one way our toolset grows in this industry.
Well, what’s the end goal of the tool after its done? To host it on a site like, scriptspot, or to sell it in another package? How will you judge which is best? Really its like asking to make a software application, and judge which is better… Maybe you should limit it to a single script in a more specific area of the application.
You could always start your own mini challenge threads, where you have each mini challenge be in a specific area, like modeling or texturing and pick the best idea for that mini challenge, before you start it.
Yeah those are good ideas. I think that would be a good way of getting people motivated to contribute ideas and share processes with one another.
I’m really into the idea of using Backburner for funky tasks at the moment. My latest ones have been using cmdjob’s to copy files locally (say, copying a set of plugins from a networked location to the maxroot\plugins\ folder of each machine). Another is to restart vrayspawner on each machine for distributed rendering.
Any other ideas like this would be great!
Edit: the idea is that these tools are wrapped up in a nice MxS interface so they can be used by any of the artists. Additionally, maxscript is used to generate the .bat files used by the nodes, some of which are quick large and wouldn’t be practical to do by hand.
This is a really cool idea. I’ve got a project specific backburner tool that sends cmdjob’s, manages them and reports completed jobs back to the MXS ui… but I found that even some rudimentary tasks in MAX are disabled on render nodes, due to the UI being shut down.
Have you already done this?
I am actually thinking of doing something more complex than this.
I have a new, very complex class structure to my code, which has some serious advantages, but it’s a pain in the arse to scroll through, and can’t use fileIn’s or includes. My idea is as follows:
Write a MXS compiler that reads files in via a function that frames them as a type such as a rollout, structure, custom attribute, scripted plugin etc. with room for accepting custom compile time extensions. An example of what I’m thinking of:
fn makeFromFile theFile formatingFNs classProps =
(
local fileContents = getFile theFile
local fileAnswer = stringStream[b][b][/b][/b] ""
format "% % \"%\"
(" classProps.type classProps.variable classProps.name to:fileAnswer--More complex arguments for plugins \ attributes
--format fileContents until a call for a formatingFN is found, repeat til EOF
format ")" to:fileAnswer
fileAnswer
)
The advantage of this for me would be that I can segment my files into an easy to modify file structure, do custom searches on variables and function calls to determine what parts of my library are required by individual plugins and integrate auto updating definitions into my code.
I know this is a long shot; but since implementing multi-threaded dotNet and creating a hidden process via command line could get past the UI updating limitations and improve speed on SOME rare tasks. Has anyone considered this?
I guess the point would be creating tools that would be practical outside of just an isolated task like auto-rigs ( I yet have to find some time to work on my Method rigger that I posted about at the end of last year ) or asset management tools.