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[Closed] Scrubbing the trackbar without clicking+dragging on it

Is this at all possible?

As far as I’ve seen it’s possible to make any keyboard shortcut a ‘modifier key’ so what I had in mind is that when you hold down a predefined keystroke and then simply shake your mouse from left to right it feeds the horizontal motion values onto the trackbar; essentially scrubbing it without having to click and drag it.

Would be a GREAT time-saver whilst animating instead of having to constantly move your mouse to the bottom of the screen, clicking on the trackbar and then scrubbing.

Any ideas?

Cheers!

9 Replies

I haven’t put a lot of thought into this, but it seems to work. I’m using the MouseTrack() function to drive the time slider based on the horizontal mouse movement. You could probably do the same thing using dotNet.

Just run the script, move the cursor back and forth in front of the viewports, and then click the right mouse button to exit.

fn trackbarScrub msg ir obj faceNum shift ctrl alt =
(
	if msg == #mouseAbort then
	(
		return #end
	)
	if msg == #freeMove then
	(
		newPos = mousePos - mouse.screenPos
		x = -newPos.x
		sliderTime += x
		mousePos = mouse.screenPos
		return #continue
	)
)

mousePos = [0,0]
mouseTrack trackCallBack:trackbarScrub

Edit: I simplified the code a bit. A nice addition would be to modify the sensitivity of the mouse movement so that you it’s not so jittery.

Try “Time Slider Capture Toggle” in Customise>UI

1 Reply
(@carlcampbell)
Joined: 11 months ago

Posts: 0

Wow! You got me there too! I thought it might’ve been some new addition to the 3dsmax 2009 but it’s there in the 3dsmax 8 I use at work too!

Thanks for the heads-up!

Wow, I didn’t even know that was there after all these years of Max use.

It’s been there a loooooong time… I couldn’t actually remember what it was called, took me a while to find it!

’tis there in r5 as well – might have always been there. Who knows when it comes to the undocumented stuff

Giggity!

Matt, that was a cool little tip. I’m on my 11th version of MAX and I never had the slightest clue that was in there.

I dunno, I bet you haven’t found the schematic node based material editor either.

I dunno, I bet you haven’t found the schematic node based material editor either.

sorry that made me laugh out loud…