Hi,
I think it is a good idea to have a helper object created and saved in the scene whenever you create a cache with Xmesh Saver.
Reason - working on version 25 of some Thinking particles asset and then saving certain groups as Xmesh cache, later on version 27 of the same TP asset after update you may want to resave again the Xmesh cache, but you have to go again and find every time the Thinking particles groups you have to save. And if the objects or groups are many and you do that 50 times it gets a little tedious.
So my suggestion is to have a helper for the Xmesh Saver, saved in the max file so that it keeps the properties or settings linked to the scene object that you want to save and you can very quickly re-save the cache for the next version
Have you tried the “Previous Sessions History” option in the XMesh Saver’s source type drop-down list?
(It looks like it went undocumented, I will have to go and update the XMesh Saver reference…)
Each time you save a selection of meshes to XMesh files, a record is created in the scene describing all settings incl. output path, time, date, scene file name, number of objects, and the list of the actual objects.
If you switch to “Previous Session History”, a list of all previous saves from this scene will be shown, with the latest save on top. You can select one or more of these previous sessions and move them down to the active list, and their combined list of meshes will be saved when you press the save button. You can then reselect “Previous Session History” and you will see that your last save is also added to the list, on top. If you save the MAX file, close 3ds Max, and reopen that scene (even months or years later), you can use this feature to set the object selection to something you have used previously.
You can also right-click any of the entries on the list and select “RESTORE Settings From Session History Record” to restore all relevant settings back to what they were in that session.
Another option in the context menu lets you remove an entry from the list so you can clean up and keep only the useful entries there.
The data is stored as a persistent global variable called XMeshSaverTools_LastProcessedObjects, so there is no scene helper involved.