SliderMan – Does everything that a slider can

Mar 8, 2015 by LoneRobot    3 Comments    Posted under: 3dsMax, Characters, Maxscript, pipeline, Rigging, User Controls

After many years of rigging in 3dsMax I have to admit I’ve not been a fan of viewport sliders and joysticks. Coming from animation,  I always felt that too much clutter from rigs gets in the way of the character silhouette that you’re supposed to be honing. So I’ve always been a custom attribute squirrel, hiding stuff away in the command panel.

However I was recently rigging some organic tree-like structures, and the rig and the the mesh were such that I felt it was needed to have some form of feedback about the state of the controls twinned with the animation mesh. My rigging sense was tingling – It made me realise that I didn’t have a toolset for making these myself. That’s fine, its not hard to make them, but I thought I’d give myself a couple of train rides to and from work to block something out quickly that I could give back to the community.

So SliderMan is the outcome.

There’s a few options, horizontal, vertical with flipped and centre positioned slider layouts, as well as the traditional joystick setup.

They are resizable (If the option is selected) and there’s some rudimentary alignment tools and a group option to draw a border around them. To resize, just change the width and length properties on the slider border. A joystick has to be square on creation, as the script makes a decision on whether it is a horizontal, vertical or joystick slider on the rectangle dimensions. But the joystick can be changed after creation to a rectangle if needed.

There’s also a parameter block so you can wire anything you like to them quickly and easily. The values are normalized between 0 and 1 for the default slider, or -1 and 1 for a centered slider.

A joystick has two parameters for each direction

That’s pretty much it!

To Use – Just make a rectangle shape that you want to use, or let the script create one for you. There’s a couple of point helpers to handle the resizing and limits, so you can  pop them on a hidden layer in your rig.

Enjoy!