selecting all objects that feature in another max file.

[super gnu]

title says it all really.. i merged an xref and now i wish i hadnt. i need to select all the objects that were in it, but since its been built by someone else who wasnt particularly careful, all the objects are named randomly and are on a whole stack of different layers.

since we are talking about several thousand objects and a few dozen cryptically named layers (which may or may not already have been populated in the scene before i merged this xref) , im wondering if there is any way to merge a selection from one max file to another? i.e... well.. as the title says really...

[joconnell]

Should be able to do some kind of maxscript command alright. Can you get an accurate selection of all the badly named objects in the scene you merged in? You could grab that, and then run some code to make a command to select the same objects in another scene. Hopefully the names of the objects are unique so you'd get the right objects, otherwise you'd have to find a secondary method to verify things.

[super gnu]

hm.. well i literally want to select -everything- that was in the xref, so generating the selection shouldnt be difficult. now whether those objects are unique wrt the other scene is another issue. i merged the xref and didnt get any duplicate geometry warnings, but then i dont think it actually checks if you use the merge button in the xref dialogue.


maybe it could be something that could be done from the "scene statistics" file you can save out. contains object names but also all their properties..

[Morbid Angel]

if you have the original xref file, you can generate list of files based of that, and use that list in your actual scene to select those objects.

[super gnu]

yes thats what im hoping someone can tell me how to do


generating the scene list is easy, its using it to make a selection in another file that is the problem.

might be a script too far?

[Codi]

There is a way to select the objects by creation order, you can select one of the merged objects and the following script will select the objects created/merged after this one:

select (for o in objects where o.handle >= $.handle collect o)

It's not exactly what you want but it'll help to get most of the new objects.

[super gnu]

hey cody.. thats a really sweet idea.. unfortunately the file was merged about a week ago :..(

[Codi]

Ouch... it can be a problem if you made many changes to the scene afterwards, worth a shot anyway.

[DanielBrew]

I have written tool that adds an extra column to the scene explorer allowing you to sort all scene objects in the order that they were added to the scene. Would that help?

[super gnu]

might be worth a try, but knowing the chaos that is this scene and the work that has been done on it, i suspect it would simply confuse me more.

it can be really painful to work on huge projects that have passed from one office to another, seemingly via teams of monkeys along the way.

nothing named properly, a million cryptically named layers, and the strangest method of generating a landscape ive ever dealt with.

all the more annoying as i know the team that started the job, and helped them generate a workflow that would lead to a beautifully organised and easy to edit model. since then it has been passed around like a Chinese whisper, and ive received frankesteins monster back.

merging the xref was my own silly little addition to the chaos.

[Sazzle74]

Hi, Dan Brew has asked me to post his script on for him as he's out of the office at the moment:

Scene Explorer Columns.zip

Hope this helps

[super gnu]

many thanks guys.. ill give it a whirl.

[DanielBrew]

Hi, Dan Brew has asked me to post his script on for him as he's out of the office at the moment:

[ATTACH]9859[/ATTACH]

Hope this helps

Thanks Sarah.

If you run the script once then open the scene explorer and go to add a new colunm there will be an additional one called 'created'. Ignore the contents of the column but you can use it to sort the objects by when they were added to the scene.