Grabbing The Material Preview

It's probably the hackiest thing I've ever written, but BOY, does it work.
Read MoreThe Path of the Righteous

Take some time to consider how your projects are structured before you start, and you'll be happier than Tom Cruise's Shoemaker...
Read MoreI Don’t Need Regular Expressions

There used to be two things in life that truly scared me. One was the soundtrack from Frozen. The other was Regular Expressions. Find out which one I said "Let it go" to...
Read MoreKinetic Energy

To commemorate the launch of 3ds max 2013, there's no better fanfare than a wink to the past. I was searching my office in my usual dash to get my accounts in on time and found some old max install disks.
Read MoreWhat we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday

Apologies for a slightly existential tone to my latest blog post - I was reading the excellent blog by Maya TD Hamish Mackenzie, and it did get me thinking.
Read MoreWindowBox Replanted

After sitting unloved on Scriptspot since last year, WindowBox has suddenly registered over 300 votes!
Read MoreDotNet Demystified : Part 1

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.
Read MoreStuff the revolution, I’m thinking about a Character Selection Framework

I recently developed a system that uses a basic IDE and DotNet Serialization to store the entire UI to XML. This is a small tutorial with code snippets on how I approached the task.
Read MoreAutomating Photoshop with a DotNet Class Library and COM interop

Control photoshop in any way you like using a custom COM wrapper from 3DSMax
Read MoreUsing Base64 encoding in 3dsMax

If you have ever received an email and instead of your normal information for pharmaceutical-related special offers and personal member enhancement, you get a jumble of nonsense, you're probably already aware of what a Base64 encoded string looks like.
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Autodesk Webinar
Despite a nagging suspicion that "Webinar" is a made up word, I will be speaking about some of the work at Nexus and how 3dsmax features in our animation pipeline.

Two Clicks From Amsterdam
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...

SpeechBot – A handy script to load and save morpher keys
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.

New Script! Scene Bracket
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

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

Adding mirror functionality to a custom rig
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.

Using HitchHiker – Building a Matte/Shadow material utility
This post is to show how you can use Hitchhiker to develop maxscript tools in super quick time.

You can tell by the way I walk I’m a woman’s man
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 optimizing animation production.

HitchHiker Update v4.4
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...

Flexible Animation System for Fingers and Hands
For many years as a character animator I have wanted a system to aid with the animation of fingers. The balance is trying to find the balance between time and ease of animation.

Loving LINQ is easy because it’s beautiful
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.

Capturing the viewport according to render resolution.
Another snippet! For Rig Studio, I was faced with the problem of providing a method to not only render the […]

The camera sometimes lies
Just a snippet posting this time, sharing a small file callback to lock and unlock a camera’s position.

Floating Dialog Amnesty
If you just just stopped taking away my dialogs, you wouldn't have forced me to build this monstrosity.

New DotNet control for download – HitchHiker
HitchHiker is a VB DotNet/ 3dsMax User Control and is designed to provide automatic thumbnailing of directories containing a variety of media types.

Retrieving the 3DSMax File Thumbnail with DotNet
Getting hold of the 3dsMax file thumbnail can be tricky, but with a bit of COM interop, it can be achieved.

MultiThreading in 3D Studio Max using the BackgroundWorker class
You will all be aware that when you perform any intensive calculation process within MaxScript that it pretty much ties up that session of max. Luckily the DotNet chaps have provided something that does all the hard work for you - The BackgroundWorker.