Friday 22 May 2015

Biped Picker

Another tool I dearly missed in 3dsMax after working on Motionbuilder was this:

If, like the little dude up there, you're wondering what's this oddly proportioned, flip-flops clad blue surfer is doing on such a serious blog, that means you never laid eye on Motionbuilder. At least not before version 2012. Well that weird guy is as helpful as he is ugly. He allows you to select (almost) any part of the rig without having to click it in the viewport, which can come in handy in many situations.
Anyway, trying to reproduce this for the 3dsMax Biped was the first thing I ever did in MAXScript !

Friday 15 May 2015

Interactive Time Scrubber

Let's keep on the subject "How to turn Max into Motionbuilder"!
While working with Motionbuilder, I got accustomed to use the Time Scrubbing by holding down the J key and dragging left or right in the viewport. It allows to easily see what's in between the keyframes, which can be very useful, especially for video games animation!

Wednesday 13 May 2015

Shortcuts for Next and Previous Keyframe

That's one super simple script, but one that I use all the time to animate. In Max, you have a Key Mode Toggle button to switch between 'Previous/Next Frame' and 'Previous/Next Key'.
After using Motionbuilder I found that having two different sets of shortcuts for each function was much more handy, so I wrote these very simple scripts.