duber's blog

As with my previous post, I’m preparing a few handy tools for 3ds Max artists using Mari and Nuke. This bit is the fun part with Nuke: live communication between 3ds Max and Nuke.

Stay tuned!

I’m starting to write a useful set of tools for Mari and 3ds Max users. This is the very beginning – establishing reliable communication from 3ds Max’s MAXScript console directly to Mari.

I’ll keep you posted.

I don’t think I have to praise regular expressions here, however, I wanted to point out one extremely useful case where regular expressions were pretty much the single most useful, fastest and not so obvious choice in my 3ds Max pipeline.

The thing with 3ds Max is that regular expressions are foreign to MAXScripters and they don’t usually use them. I too am more used to regex in Python or IronPython than MAXScript. However, since we do have access to .NET in MAXScript, we can use its Regex class inside MAXScript.

Why I’m mentioning this and why could it be useful to you? I bumped into a little issue with my pipeline’s handling of rendered files. They assume to be exactly the same as I set them up in 3ds Max, which is logical and correct. However, since I started using Deadline’s SMTD script for submitting my files to the render farm, which takes care of handling the path remapping and storing, it also accidentally took care of letter casing. So, in the end, my render files were being saved all upper cased: “\\SERVER\PROJECT\RENDERS\ABC.EXR” instead of what I set in the Render Dialog: “\\SERVER\Project\Renders\ABC.exr”. The reason was simple, I used simple MAXScript substituteString() method to re-map my local paths to my server, UNC, paths and I converted everything to upper case just in case I got a mismatch:

substituteString (toUpper srcPath) @"D:" @"\\RAMMSTEIN\__UNMANAGED_PROJECTS__"

(more…)

Here’s a video demonstrating the power and practical usage of Shotgun (data) brought over to 3ds Max natively via our Python plugin, duberPython.

Just a quick shout about the compatibility of duberPython and the latest and greatest IronPython 2.7.1 release (released a couple of days ago). All working smoothly and quickly, as expected.

Should you need more info on duberPython or what we’re doing with it and Shotgun or Tactic, just drop me a line and I’ll be more than happy to show you how cool duberPython is.

If you’re used to scripting your GUIs in Max with the standard rollouts via “createDialog …”, you might be a little confused and lost when you first try to use a 100% .NET Form object instead.

Whatever your reason might be for using .NET Forms instead of standard dialogs, you’ll still want to:

• Create the main form and define its properties
• Define other UI controls, such as buttons, checkboxes etc…
• Define event handlers for specific control objects
• Initialize and display the entire Form with all the controls and functionality tied in

All this is done a little differently in the .NET realm than what you’re used to in MAXScript. But before you start, check out Paul Neale’s great .NET tutorials on his site. Paul provides some great info for anyone trying to use .NET controls in their scripts.

Now, there is one thing I bumped into, you can actually use .NET objects in MAXScript rollouts, however, you cannot use regular max controls in .NET Forms! So, trying to assign a standard button to a .NET Form will result in an error.

You might think that this creates a burden on the TD to actually skin and customize the .NET controls to look like native 3ds Max GUI elements. You can do this, of course, but it’d really be a lot of additional work to hassle around with color classes, HWNDs etc… you actually don’t need to worry about this as there is an Assembly available in standard Max installations. It’s a little .dll, found in the root of Max, called MaxCustomControls.dll. This Assembly contains some of the more exotic controls, such as SceneExplorer, but it also contains a complete Form control that has already been modified so it reflects your 3ds Max environment, including all the colors, themes and even an initialization method for showing the control as a part of the max process/window.

(more…)

If you’re interested in a live demo or more information about the duber Python and Shotgun integration in 3ds Max, drop me a line via e-mail at: ldubeda[at]duber.cz

I’ve had a few customers and clients asked me specifically about getting Dictionaries from 3ds Max to Python using our 3ds Max Python plugin, but I wasn’t able to answer with an elegant or productive way of handling these data types in the MAXScript environment.

Until recently, I’ve been handling Dictionaries two ways:

1. String parsing (i.e. a very primitive way of handling foreign data types, not really recommended)
2. Manual wrapping (i.e. passing in a List or Array object and converting it back to a Dictionary object)

String parsing is the worst possible way of handling such an issue. It’s very cumbersome, highly unintuitive and with MAXScript string capabilities, extremely difficult. Manual wrapping, on the other hand, is rather more elegant, faster and you can use other, known, data types to construct your future Dictionary and have that converted in Python natively. The down side is, you have to be very careful with the way you’re handling the future Dictionary. The thing is, only a tuple of list pairs can be successfully converted to a Dictionary in Python. This is a bit limiting as we don’t have any specific way to tell what is a Tuple and what is a List in our Python implementation in MAXScript as there are no such data types available. So, what I did was I had an Array sent to Python (an actual .NET Array object, by the way) I had that converted first to a Tuple, which is pretty straight forward and then have that converted to a Dictionary. Worked fine, but it was a bit difficult to construct more complex Dictionaries, especially nested Dictionaries, in MAXScript.

(more…)

Since Max 2008 (I believe) we have the great SciTE MAXScript editor in Max. It’s an awesome IDE. Very flexible, very lightweight, fast and powerful. Sure, there are much more robust or more beefed up IDEs out there, but for an integrated, dedicated, MAXScript IDE, it’s simply awesome. It’s so good I installed SciTE standalone and use it as an IDE for my Python and other scripting tasks.

So, I’ve been trying to unify my code page across the SciTE editors (the standalone and the integrated Max’s editor) and settled on a standard UTF-8 encoding, which seemed to work just great. However, I just bumped into a very strange bug where Deadline reported a “bad syntax” error on my jobs which were using PostLoad scripts to automatically repath all my assets in my scenes.

The worst part was, the scripts were perfectly fine. They worked just fine in my local Max sessions, but they refused to work when run on the farm. I accidentaly discovered that it was related to the file’s encoding. When I resaved the file in Notepad (on my server) using the ANSI character encoding, the jobs suddenly started to work.

So, if you’re using a UTF-8 encoding in your SciTE editors, including and especially in the integrated Pro Editor in 3ds Max, make sure to save the scripts in a different encoding before executing them on the render farm.

I just bumped into a very weird thing.

I have a master object that stores a Custom Attribute definition with some reserved value containers and a function that gets called from withing scripted controllers (float_script()) that calculates a wheel’s circumference based off of the input data (wheel radius, distance traveled etc…).

Now, I’ve noticed there is a constant call to this CA function when I have a graph editor open and simply move my mouse cursor on screen across the viewports! This is pretty bad for the setup I have since it forces the wheels to update their rotation values many times more often through a single frame than it should! I have no idea why this is or how to stop it, but it’s something you should consider when tweaking your rigs!

This happened on 3ds Max 2011 x64, not sure about other versions, though.