This post details my talk at End User Event this year. Yes it’s a little on the late side,due to me starting a new job on the following Monday. But I guess it’s a case of better late than never…

After sitting unloved on Scriptspot since last year, WindowBox has suddenly registered over 300 votes! Many thanks to everyone who pressed the plus button, and I’m glad you have all been finding it useful.

Yakkety Yak, It is always said that careless talk can cost lives, but careless talk in production costs you time. Perhaps that is why they call them deadlines.

I’ve been going through a folder on my hard drive and seeing if there are any useful scripted nibbles that I can release to the community. This is the first, and is a script that has been used in production for many, many, years

Just a short post to promote a great event that I am involved in this year.

The End User Event is a no-nonsense get together for people working inside the Media & Entertainment industry.

Do you realise that you’ve been writing maxscript for too long….?

I get a fair few requests asking if I could do some beginner’s tutorials about how to use dotnet in 3dsMax. It seems that a lot of people would like to get a handle on how to use the language properly. It’s actually no surprise to me that this is the case  – I also found at the start that If approached in the wrong way, dotnet and maxscript is a confusing and verbose place,  much like IKEA on the first day of school holidays.

Veteran LR.net readers will know that a few years back I published a research project into using managed code to control Photoshop using COM interop. It’s been a popular article, so it is with great pleasure that I am now publishing an update.

On our last production, I had to find a quick way of implementing a system that would allow me to set up basic mirror selection functions on any custom rig.

LoneRobot.net is now available as an RSS feed. Please feel free to subscribe so that you don’t miss any new posts with tips, tricks and free scripts.

This post is to show how you can use Hitchhiker to develop maxscript tools in super quick time.

Jamie’s Jewels is a blog is created by Jamie Gwilliam of Autodesk. Jamie has been a very useful contact at Autodesk for me on the last project, and is a jolly nice chap to boot.

On the last few projects I have used a system that I developed as part of Lonerobot R&D. It’s a walk system called Zimmerframe that is targeted at optimising animation production. The reason I decided to develop something like this was simple – when working as an animator on production, there were many times, especially when I was up against the clock on my weekly allocation that I wanted to eliminate the time it took setting up characters into position in a shot. This was so I could get on with actually animating the performance!

I’ve been so swamped with work this last year, my planned update to Hitchhiker had to be stalled. It’s a shame really, as I have had a working version of the updated assembly for a while but no time to update the help files to show how to use it. Finally, here it is…

For many years as a character animator I have wanted a system to aid with the animation of fingers. It’s one of the things that tend to be done as an afterthought when pushed for time on a production, but there is no doubting that some of the nicest animation will always have really great hand gestures. The balance is trying to find the balance between time and ease of animation. If you are really pushed for time, it would be far better that you could store hand poses that you use most of the time, with a view to having a robust toolset to allow you to refine them afterwards.

One thing is certain, XML is prolific. I wanted to research the most efficient way of using this versatile language in future systems I develop for 3dsmax animation pipelines.

Another snippet, just translated into a maxcript-friendly format. If you need to get the file icon that is associated with a particular type, you can’t get this ordinarily from within a managed environment. There are some great examples on how to use the windows API so these can be added into maxscript by converting them [...]

Another snippet! For Rig Studio, I was faced with the problem of providing a method to not only render the view to the design surface, but capture it also. I felt that sometimes a full render wouldn’t be neccesary and users would want the option of performing a viewport capture for the UI background. If [...]

  Normally, colourful language should be left in the snooker hall, but when it comes to max, there’s nothing more potty-mouth inducing when a custom UI doesn’t sit with the rest of the application. In my previous post about Rig Studio (my IDE for generating selection dialogs) I talked about using the maxtoolbar renderer to [...]

If you’ve got lots of different layers in the layer manager, its fine when you are in the actual file, but when you start having sets, characters and props in the same scene, it is sometimes difficult to navigate the interface. This is another snippet with a macro for adding a prefix to selected layers [...]