Illusion Catalyst Tools for Max
mod
Just saw this over at cgtalk. looks really cool.
http://www.illusioncatalyst.com/index.html
A guy made some nice toolset for max. Looks really good. And besides that, its free.
http://www.illusioncatalyst.com/index.html
A guy made some nice toolset for max. Looks really good. And besides that, its free.
Replies
Even more amazing its for free- since it has some stuff PolyBoost and Orionflame do not have yet
if i get used to this it might make stuff a lot easier
japhir, try increasing your display resolution.
Is anyone getting any use out of this for their day-to-day, or was it more just a curiosity that you forgot about after a couple days of playing around with the cool features?
Anyone want to share workflows or setups that might convince me to give this a real try?
I'm glad to see this thread around from the times I wasn't a polycounter yet. Thanks to Bitmap for starting it and to all of you who hanged around.
I don't know how to say how much I strive for information about users experience with IllusionCatalyst. I requested good time lapses references (here) to see how people work and define guidelines for new instruments. I'm currently studying the 3ds sdk to code IC2. There are a lot of technical difficulties, C++ is not very friendly and sdk even less, just to use an euphemism. I therefore cannot say anything about timings and so on. Every time I figure out how to do something there are other two things I miss, anyway I'm holding up. :poly127:
It's still a bit too soon to open a wish list, since I want to develop a solid core, but I'm anytime open to ideas and feedback about existing and upcoming instruments. Maybe to correct a glitch is a question of seconds, but I don't even know it is a trouble for you.
@ glib: You're perfectly right, IC.Shape was developed with organic modeling in mind, but I'd like to code new tools and instruments to help the more accurate and geometric shaped hard surfaces modeling. As PolyHertz mentioned (thanks), a try at this is the experimental feature in IC.PolySplitRing (pressing shift) that draws a loop keeping constant the offset from the closest pick side.
@ PolyHertz: I kept in mind your pattern selector tool. Something nice can come from it, in some spare time I nailed down the interface and thought out usability. Cannot make promises, but it could become a new tool.
Thank you very much for your interest and support.
Also, sense you say your always looking for new ideas, their's another one I've wanted to see for a while. In my workflow I use the bridge command almost constantly, as is by far one of my most used tools, but its horribly stupid and basic. So as to get extra functionality out of it (such as the ability to create tris between two adjoined edges or make connections between two loops where only part of the geo is open) I use an ancient plugin that was designed for Max5 called PolyMagus. Unfortunatly its extended feature set ends short of what would be theal productivity booster: The ability to mass bridge a large number of selections at a time. For example:
In order to bridge these areas with the default command it'd be necessary to deselect all of them, select the desired edges to join, bridge, and then repeat for every area. I find myself doing this quite a bit, and it gets to be a huge time burn. In conjunction with the pattern selector script, and/or along with polymagus functions, this could be extremely useful I believe.
Also, like the other script, polyboost (and hense assumidly max2010) don't have anything like it.
thanks for the tips, the more the better. I've just got the PolyMagus script to try and take a good look at its features, and possibly figure out something better, anyway I don't want to plagiarize anyone's work. It will fit in my inspiration scripts folder. FYI current IC.Shape can bridge two edges sharing a vertex: in Draw mode by dragging out from the mesh while pressing ALT and landing over the next edge. It's not a super solution, but better than nothing.
It took me some time to reply, cause I've been dedicated to taming the "SDK's PainterInterface beast". It seems the next IC will work on Edit Poly modifiers too.
Thank you again
@ Glib: I infer from your posts that your models are mainly mechanical, are there features you miss and would really like to have which would improve and ease your modeling workflow? Maybe some existing tool that doesn't work exactly as you like, or instruments you wish to see developed more. I'm not speaking about IC in particular, this is a very general question. Sometimes a good unexpected outcome can come from a need.
p.s.
3ds Max Design 2010 has been released about two days ago, the trial is already available for download and I haven't read a single line about it on this forum... I love you guys, this is exactly the difference between who do the job, and who can only speak about it!
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." -- George Bernard Shaw
Yeah a light dockable version with small icons would be really great