Chris Dragon's 3D Studio MAX Plug-ins and Scripts

MAXScript Shortcuts Manager

This plugin allows you to bind keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) to most MAXScripts. With it, you can do things like create a keyboard shortcut for a button (like Weld Target) that doesn't have a built-in shortcut of its own. With a little more creativity you could even do something like bind 1, 2, 3, 4 to MAXScripts that would detect what type of object you were working with (editable mesh, editable spline, NURBS) and jump into the appropriate sub-object mode (ie pressing 2 would jump to edge sub-object mode when using editable mesh, segment mode when using editable spline, and surface mode when using NURBS).

Download v1.1 full release

MAX Wintab support

This plug-in is currently on the back burner and unsupported. Because of limitations in the MAX SDK v3.1 and earlier I can't access the MAX features I really want to access (having to do with zooming and rotation of viewports). If they improve functionaity in future SDKs I may resume development.
I was always annoyed that I got an Intuos 4D mouse with 5 buttons and could never use the 4th or 5th buttons for anything very useful in MAX. So I wrote this driver to make these two buttons act as "active" zoom and rotate (like the middle mouse button can be set to active pan). This driver supports the standard Wintab API so it should work with any tablet or other input device supporting Wintab (most all of them, I'm guessing).

Please note that this version has a few known bugs, including the possibility of crashing Max if you click multiple mouse buttons too quickly. It will also sometimes stop working if you switch focus from Max to another program and back to Max. At this point you need to restart Max to get it working again. In Windows 2000 it's necessary to click and hold the left mouse button before clicking the 4th or 5th buttons to zoom or rotate. I'm not sure why this is the case in Windows 2000 but not in NT. Again, I don't plan to fix any of these bugs unless a future MAX SDK supports the additional functionality I'm looking for and I can make this plug-in truly useful.

Update 10-3-99: v0.2 expands the mouse event queue so clicks or unclicks are no longer lost, which was causing a downclick to initiate say zoom mode but it was often hard to exit zoom mode because the upclick event would be pushed out of the tiny queue by mouse movement events.

Download v0.2

Fix invisible edges script

This is a MAXScript you can use to work around a particular bug in Max 3.x (and possibly in 2.x as well). Ever notice that when you have two polygons that share a common edge, and you go in edge sub-object mode, you can actually select the edge of either polygon? Create a grid object, convert it to an editable mesh, and click any edge near the middle of the grid. Note it says something like "Edge 96 Selected" over in the editable mesh rollout (in MAX 3.x at least). Click the same place again and it will change to something like "Edge 45 Selected". So indeed there are actually two edges there.
Normally Max hides this fact from you and makes both edges act as one. If you click either edge and then click Visible or Invisible, it changes the visibility of both edges. However, the visibility of the edges can get out of sync. I'm not sure how, but it seems to happen if you start collapsing or welding vertices and/or turning edges. When one of these two edges is visible and the other is invisible, some Max tools treat the edge pair as visible, and some as invisible. For example, in edge sub-object mode, the pair of edges appear to be a dashed (invisible) line. But if you switch to face sub-object mode, the edges change to a solid (visible) line. If you apply a MeshSmooth modifier it considers the edge pair to be visible as well. This can be quite annoying as you can't be sure all your invisible appearing edges in edge sub-object mode are actually both invisible.
And so I wrote a MAXScript utility to let you select all invisible or visible edges to see if you have problem edges (ie if you select all visible edges with this script and you see dashed lines selected in edge sub-object mode, you know you've got problems). It can also fix your mesh by finding all edge pairs where one edge is visible and the other is invisible and either making them both visible or making them both invisible.

Download v1.0

Hide vertices on hidden faces script

This script simply hides vertices that are part of faces you have hidden in sub-object mode. This can happen if you hide faces (which also hides vertices in Max 3.x, though not in 2.x) then maybe hide some additional vertices so they aren't in the way, and then need to click Unhide All to work with some of vertices you hid. Of course this also unhides the vertices that are part of the faces you previously hid, so you end up with distracting vertices floating in space, which can be very annoying. This script lets you hide all those floating vertices with one click. To install as a macroscript, just drag the code below onto any toolbar in Max and it should prompt you to create a macroscript button.

Download v1.0

Questions or comments, e-mail kanis@draconic.com