'Mission Control' (Enhanced Spreadsheet Editor) : Ideas needed

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

Thanks Dan,
I'm glad you were able to make out something of what was going on! It's my first attempt at doing a screencapture, so it's VERY rough. I'll aim to make some more illustrative videos shortly with annotation and voice-over for those that understandably have no patience for silent demonstration vids!

[DanielBrew]

I need to learn how to do those screen capture videos myself. I've been putting it off for ages.
.
btw. If you're interested I have a short function that converts Max colour values to .net images that can be displayed in a DataGridViewImageColumn instead of "color 128 32 65"

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

That's ok, I already have the code to change the background colour to match the colour value, so you can see both the colour and the value.

[DanielBrew]

Ah ok, that's a good idea.

[jdrouse]

hey this is fantastic! I'm always snooping thru my artists heavy scenes and this will be a great help. Make sure it can seek thru a bunch of weird multi sub materials and shell materials! We use a shell material to see diffuse in the viewport nice and fast but it def seems to get wonky with scripts and material converters.

I look forward to a public release of this. Excellent work!
-john

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

Hey John,
Thanks for the interest!
I'll test this out with shell materials, but from what I can see so far it handles complex shader setups no problem.

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

John, I did a quick test and nesting materials within multimaterials within shells within shells posed no problem in the script revealing all the materials/maps.

[re:FORM]

Sorry for the long radio silence.... I'm please to announce that Mission Control is getting closer to being ready for release! I've spent some serious time and effort on the code to improve stability and performance.

I will be releasing a series of clips showing features and functions of Mission Control in advance of it's release, and I'm looking to start collating a list of likely candidates to join the beta-testing team.

The first of these clips is now online on my blog, please go and check it out! It's a quick "Light-lister vs Mission Control" showdown with a scene of just 121 lights. It's a bit of an unfair fight to be honest.

Check out my blog for more info.

http://patrick.reformstudios.com/201...-light-lister/

[Vizioen]

Sorry for the long radio silence.... I'm please to announce that Mission Control is getting closer to being ready for release! I've spent some serious time and effort on the code to improve stability and performance.

I will be releasing a series of clips showing features and functions of Mission Control in advance of it's release, and I'm looking to start collating a list of likely candidates to join the beta-testing team.

The first of these clips is now online on my blog, please go and check it out! It's a quick "Light-lister vs Mission Control" showdown with a scene of just 121 lights. It's a bit of an unfair fight to be honest.

Check out my blog for more info.

http://patrick.reformstudios.com/201...-light-lister/

Awesome, very interesting, was afraid this wasn't going to see the light of day.

[re:FORM]

Thanks Vizioen, I was afraid of that too!

Here's an example of the tool for managing cameras.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Very good tool! Love it like maya spreadsheet

[re:FORM]

Renderer parameters access.
http://patrick.reformstudios.com/201...erer-settings/

[re:FORM]

Support for all 3rd-party plugins : Vray in this example.

Read More...

[re:FORM]

Here's a quick test showing how long it takes to open Mission Control, and then to display 2000 objects in the spreadsheet.

The critical issue is the number of columns, so as long as you limit this to a low number, the refresh is acceptable. Other than limiting the update the visible rows, there's not much I can do to optimise this. I'll look in to this and see if it can be done without slowing interactivity speed.

[re:FORM]

Hmm, you can scrap that last post. I've just made a bit of a breakthrough in the performance of the script.

Here's a clip showing the performance improvements.


Only 1400 objects, but setup and refresh are down to below a second, scrolling is fast, and for bonus points, I'm showing real-time(ish) feedback of animated values with colour hilighting of animated tracks and keyframed values. I imagine this might be quite handy for animators!

Pink = animated track
Red = keyframe

Please let me know what other types of information would be useful to have through value colouring. I think some kind of sanity-check system could be developed so you can set a collection of value ranges you prefer to work within for certain objects/modifier/material parameters, and if anything sits outside those values, they would be highlighted in the UI.