Wow, this clears soooo much off of Autodesk’s TODO list.
How long have we wanted to have an interactive VertexPaint? Or an interactive Channel Info? Or wanted to Displace using more than one map channel? Or 3D displacement? Wish you still had Harry Denholm’s Soft Selection Converter? This is going to fix all those little annoying deficiencies.
This is going to be fun. Of course, what’s the easiest way for us to add a pre-made flow? We can’t just make a new modifier, and loading the presets seems tedious. I guess a macroscript is our best bet?
Adding a modifier with the MacroScript (one click), opening the Editor (second click) and double-clicking a preset name from the list (3rd+4th click) plus some clicks for navigating possible hierarchies of Presets is not tedious in my book, but I understand that you want a faster workflow. Adding Max modifiers take typically two or three clicks.
It would be relatively easy to add a “MacroScript header” in the beginning of a MagmaScript file so when you run that code, a new modifier is inserted into the stack and the encapsulated flow is loaded automatically into it. This would be one option.
Another option would be to have a single MacroScript that, when clicked, pops up a list/browser of modifier presets similar to the Max Modifiers list (possibly with better sorting/searching/filtering controls) where you pick the preset name from (like you do now inside the Editor), and a new modifier gets created on the stack of the selected objects. This could have nice icons created using a screenshot of the viewport - you create a stand-in object, e.g. a sphere or cylinder or teapot and design your modifier on top of it, then when you “publish” the preset, a screenshot is taken from the viewport and stored on disk next to the preset with the same name. When you search the names, you also get serious thumbnails (up to full size viewport screenshots like in Krakatoa History) to browse from so you know what the modifier does.
There might be some other possible approaches.
I intend to try out some of these and you will tell me what works for you
Btw, once the Debug mode is finished, it would add another level of user access to mesh data. You will be able to peek into all those channels in a spreadsheet form and literally read your positions, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material IDs and so on as text as you can with Krakatoa particles in Magma’s Debugger and the PDV. Of course, a Mesh Data Viewer has always been possible using MAXScript. Not sure why I never wrote one…
In the Beta 3 due out today (if nothing breaks), there will be a new MacroScript “Add Genome Preset”. When activated (via icon, menu, quad or shortcut), a menu will pop up with all saved presets and you can pick one to be applied to the current selection.
So if you assign it to a keyboard shortcut, you can invoke that menu at any point of your workflow to drop another Genome-based modifier into the scene…
I run it from a toolbar myself.
sounds waay cool!