A quick update of this tool in order to add the latest 3dsmax9 features, people found that some menus were missing from the Quad menus when the old script was installed. Stich, Sketch, Pack, and Relax menus should be back were originally are in 3dsmax9.

Download: [ UnwrapTools1.50.zip ]

How to make XSI and MAX friends

If you work a lot with these two softwares you end playing and trying the craziest things to make them communicate as if they were friends. Probably other people have had the same idea but since I haven’t seen it posted online, I will explain this experiment that I did a while ago that amazed people at the studio the first time they saw it but then nobody could find a real application for it… to have XSI and MAX opened side by side , move an object in XSI and MAX would replicate in realtime the same movements, it looks so cool!

I knew 3dsmax could act as an OLE server and that XSI could create ActiveX controls easily. Taking advantage of this, I created a simple script in 3dsMax that registers a function that XSI can call using the "Max.Application.8" ActiveX control. It sounds difficult but it is actually really easy to code.

What if that maxcript function just moves an object in Max ? I could create a scripted operator in XSI that calls that function everytime the object moves inside XSI.

I captured a video where you can easily see the objects moving in both applications at the same time.

The explanation:

Setting up 3dsmax OLE server:
As I said before, 3dsmax must be acting as a OLE server.I’ve included a .reg file that basically does it for you , you just have to make sure that the last line of that file contains the location to your 3dsmax program ( currently it is pointing to ‘C:\3dsmax8\3dsmax.exe’ ).

• Run the file ‘maxscript8.reg’ double clicking on it and 3dsmax will be ready to act as a OLE server. ( you can also refer to the Maxscript documentation for more details )

Making the magic happen:

• Open Autodesk 3dsmax, and run the script XSItoMax.ms that registers the example function.
• Open the 3dsmax file XSItoMax.max, that contains the cone object.
• Run SoftImage XSI, and open the XSItoMax.scn file provided , that also contains the cone object.
• Finally move the cone in XSI and, if everything went smooth, you should see it moving in 3dsmax at the same time, magic!

Just to clarify that I’ve done this experiment with 3dsmax version 8.0, and XSI version 5.0, so the scenes are saved with those versions.
In the zip file , I’ve also included a XSI plugin ("executeMaxCommandPlugin.js") that generalizes this experiment and allows to call any maxscript function from XSI, the trick is that it is just calling the "execute" maxscript function that accepts a string as input value (copy it to your XSI plugins directory, and you will have a new command ‘executeMaxCommand’ )

Download: [ xsitomax.zip ]
Download: [ xsitomax.mov 720×470 ]

It’s been a while because I’ve been extremely busy last couple of months moving and at work but … there it is!
Fernando, this is the script you requested in the wishlist section, I hope it does what you need. As always any improvement or any bug, please people let me know and I’ll fix it. Thanks for your suggestions.

The script turns on/off the silhouette appareance of the objects, making their wireframe color black (customizable) and the viewport shade to object mode. It can be assigned to a shorcut key to easy access. The option menu is displayed when the user presses the shift key at the same time that runs the script, so the silhouette color can be customized as well as to affect only the selected objects instead of the whole scene (default behaviour). When the silhouette mode is off the objects recover their original wireframe color.

Download: [ Silhouette.zip ]

I’ve been programming this for a friend that is working in his shortfilm (thanks Luis).
Basically the idea is to manage different scene animation ranges in a easy way. It allows to save scene ranges and to chenge between them easily, save/load them to disk, or adquire the animation range of an object like a camera for example. Includes its own slider time to allow to play animation only between the range specified even without changing the current 3dsmax time animation range (for example 3dsamx animation range set from 0 to 100 and we want to play looping the animation only between frames 50 to 75).

Download: [ AnimationRangeManager.zip ]

Material Editor Utilities contain several scripts that add new funtionality to the Material editor. To Install the script just simply decompress the zip file into your 3dsmax directory. By default the script creates new menus under the Menu "Util" from the Material Editor but you can always assign keyboard shortcuts to any of the funcionalities of this script. As always let me know if you find something strange or you would like to add more useful things to this, thanks.

• Hold/Fetch Materials Slots
• Get Material sfrom scene, Get Materials from selection
• Extract Materials from Multimaterial, Extract Textures from Material
• Sort Materials by Object, by Name, by Type
• Next page / Previous page (at last we can have more than 24 materials in the MEditor!)
• Synchronize Material Editor with Scene Selection
• Reset Material Editor

Download: [ MaterialEditorUtilities.zip ]