New Script - Tweaker, by Colin Senner

[tricky]

VERY VERY VERY GOOD!!!! This is really clever, and massively useful for sunlight studies. Thankyou.

(now if only it could work with some kind of auto exposure / auto white balance)

[tricky]

Great wrk on the Tweaker script.

I was just looking at the MPManager. Could you explain how this works?

We use a lot of XREF scenes (Max 2009 64bit), and it would be nice to render a matte for one of the objects buried within one of these XREFs. Is this possible?

<Aha - I think I get it now. Choose the object and when you render, it renders only that object. I was confused because the GI is calculated for the entire scene and the render is RGB. I wrongly assumed it was just going to render me a black and white matte. Is there a way that all the objects in the list could appear alphabetically, or better still, grouped by XREF AND alphabetically?>

<Another idea: could there be an option to override all materials so that it just renders a black and white matte of the objects. This would be a very quick way to render matte of XREF based objects. We use a script called RenderMask all the time for mattes, but it doesn't work when we are using XREF scenes.>

[peprgb]

Super useful-functional, how many times i found myself changing RefGlos ,5 ,55 ,6 and rendering each one........

Thank you very much and keep the good k¡job

[MoonDoggie]

Glad you guys like it. Tricky, sorry I wasn't able to get to your questions earlier. I've been out of town for the weekend.

MPManager is an old script of mine, if I had time I'd completely re-write it, but it does work. I'll look into adding the functionality you're requesting if you promise to use the shit out of it, to my knowledge you're the only person who uses it

-Colin

[MoonDoggie]

Super useful-functional, how many times i found myself changing RefGlos ,5 ,55 ,6 and rendering each one........

Thank you very much and keep the good k¡job

You're very welcome, I did the same thing until now

[pixelplume]

Colin....

I just wasted about 5 hours problem solving some geometry corruption issues......of course in the midst of 3d madness I like to pile it higher and deeper. I downloaded tweaker to try it with horizontally rotating an hdr map. Fantastic! I barely read the directions, clicked a few things and it gave me an answer. Thank you very much.

[MoonDoggie]

Yessssss! Glad to hear it, watch the video and read my previous update post. It now lets you control the controller properties assigned to objects as well, (like a daylight system, any motion controller etc). Rotation HDRI maps has been on my mind for months because I always do it manually and it's a pain, so that was the original idea for this script, but after thinking about it a bit more I realized the full potential and it can change almost anything (even things you shouldn't change and that max will freak out and hard quit if you do, cough*. Let's just say that setting your anti-aliaser doesn't like to be set to a float value .

Enjoy.

[SimonC]

MPManager is an old script of mine, if I had time I'd completely re-write it, but it does work. I'll look into adding the functionality you're requesting if you promise to use the shit out of it, to my knowledge you're the only person who uses it

-Colin

We use it primarily to render out people passes for animation. It is a must for anyone who extensively uses xrefs in thier workflow! Thanks for your efforts.

Simon

[MoonDoggie]

Haha Simon, good to hear someone uses it. I'll check into making it more robust. Give me a wishlist and I'll implement it.

[tricky]

Colin: I seem to be getting very dark renders when I am using Tweaker at the moment. Rendering a frame normally gives me the expected results, but when I render through Tweaker, the files are very dark. I've had it working before on a different project, but this is driving me crazy. It'll be something obvious but I can't think what.....

<I think it could be a gamma issue. How do I tell the images saved out of Tweaker to have gamma of 2.2?>

[MoonDoggie]

Tricky,
I work exclusively in an LWF setting so I wrote this with that in mind. If you check the checkbox that asks you to view the renders after completion do they come up correctly in the normal VFB? I can quickly add in a gamma save option in tweaker in a couple minutes to accommodate you and other people who might be experiencing this issue, though it should work based on what gamma you have set in the VRay color settings (though I will have to double check this) and your normal 3dsmax gamma set.

Can you send me a simple file so I can quickly test and get you a fix?

Thanks,
Colin

[tricky]

Hi Colin

I'm having an odd problem with Tweaker_10ms.

I've recently reinstalled my system and am now running W7 x64 with Max 2009 x64 and Vray 1.5 RC5. On using Tweaker with our daylight system (vray sun), the render seems to start ok, but it aborts prematurely with the error:-

MAXScript Rollout Handler Exception
--Runtime error: Unable to open renderer, possible recursion.

Any ideas what could be the matter?

[MoonDoggie]

Can you get me a test file? email me: colin.senner@gmail.com. I'll fix it immediately. Thanks Tricky.

-Colin