Turbo Smooth Max Script AND Tutorial: For Beginners

BradMyers82

Hey guys, I'm getting to some tutorials I promised I would make today. Here is the first one:

It's a beginners Macro Script tutorial aimed at teaching people to record actions in 3ds max and then create shortcut buttons or hotkeys for these actions. I'm sure many of you are familiar with how to do this in Photoshop. This is essentially the same thing for 3ds max, but a little more complicated to actual implement than photoshop.

I made this tutorial because there were certain things I do time and time again in 3ds max, where I wish I had a simple script for it. While the internet has a ton of these scripts available, specific ones that you might want could easily not be available.

Simply put I made a script that adds a turbo smooth modifier with 2 iterations. 3 iterations when rendering (for baking purposes) and that has Isoline display and explicit normals checked. The tutorial takes you thru this process step by step assuming you know nothing.


The tutorial can be found on my website here: http://www.bradm3d.com/MaxScriptsTutorial.html

If you want to just download the script, get it here: http://www.bradm3d.com/Brad'sTurboSmoothScript1.zip


Hope some of you find this useful, if not... Screw You! J/K Enjoy!

jocose

Nice Brad, thanks for sharing. I was just trying to figure out the best way to do this the other day.

SyncViewS

Nice one Brad, you could add at the end of the tutorial that you can customize the appearance of the newly created button by right clicking on it and selecting "Edit Button Appearance..."

It is also useful to uncheck, or adjust, "Fixed Width Text Buttons" in Customize > Preferences... dialog, under General Panel, section UI Display. In this way button width adjusts to fit its label.

swytch

Great tutorial Brad. This thread looks like a good place to post this 3DS Max Custom Quad Menu hotkey combo trick for extending hotkey customization. I learned this from someone's Vimeo tutorial but I forget whose (and it may have been posted here already). If anyone knows, please let us know since all credit belongs to him/her.

From Main Menu Bar:

1. Customize > Customize User Interface

2. Quads tab

3. New... button, give new quad menu a name (I used CustomTools)

4. Assign a hotkey in the Quad Shortcut field (I used D after removing it from Disable Viewport)

5. Drag any Action, Separator, Menu items from the left windows to the right

6. Drag items up or down to organize them

7. Right click on the item and pick Edit Menu Item Name...

8. Check the Customize Name box

9. Add an ampersand (&) and the letter you want to use before the menu item name as the additional hotkey for menu items. For example, I used &a for Attach.

Now I can hit D and pop up the quad menu or hit DA to get the Attach tool or DL to get the Graphite Loop Tools
(Note: I will probably redo this menu since this was just me playing around with it.)

MattLichy

Nice man.

I will say that instead of using $ , you should use local Obj = selection[1] or whatever you want to call Obj.

This is because of how max handles instances. If you consciously or unconsciously have an object + an instance of that object selected, the modifier additions can get multiplied when added.

Or if not that, I was running into issues when doing UV stuff, where I would add a UV modifier and go into edit mode, but when using $ instead of the selection[1], it would shift my selection to a different instanced, sometimes off somewhere else in the max file.

I think using $ might cause a little bit of a performance hit as well... but I'm not entirely sure on this.. I thought thats what the tech artist at Bungie said when I was there... but don't quote my on that..


Anyways... Keep it up!