Bake environment lighting tools

       This script is useful in baking lighting into large environments with many textures and many objects. The script works with the gambryo game engine by baking the shadows and lighting into the darkmap material slot of the gambryo shader.

 

3With this script the user can sort all the materials in the scene to be organized in the material editor or you can have the material editor only display materials that fit the search criteria. For example, all materials that have a glow map.

 

 

3The Previous and Next Button will cycle through the materials of the scene if there are more materials in the scene than slots of the material editor.

 

 

 

3The script will also allow the user to quickly convert an entire scene or the selected material to Blinn. The data of the gambryo shader is stored so the user can easily convert it back. This makes test rendering lights for baking much easier and accurate to the final results.

 

3Alpha sorting in large scenes can be very expensive and in gambryo any material flagged as alpha will be added to the calculations even if the materials alpha channel is all white or non existent. The "Start Alpha Testing" will look at every material in the scene and check the texture map for an alpha. If the alpha is all white or non existent the material will be flagged as none.

3This section of the script is dedicated to baking the lighting. The unit conversion determines the resolution of the texture based on the area in units the objects polygons. So the bigger the object the more texture space it receives. The light value is a global scale of the lights in the scene. If the scene is to dark or light the user can just change this value instead of changing ever single light in the scene. The script also re-maps the UVs on channel 99 making sure there are no overlapping UVs that can cause inaccurate lighting without disturbing the original mapping. After the baking is done all the lights are converted to point helpers and flagged as non-exportable. The lights data is stored in the user props of the helper and can be converted back to a light if needed.

 

 

Find missing and duplicate textures script:

      This script is used in fixing missing texture issues in maxfiles that contain hundreds of texture paths that are spread across many different directories. The script scans the open maxfile for missing textures and scans the projects working directory provided at the top for those missing texture maps. It then generates a selectable list of all the missing textures in window on the left. The selected texture map is displayed in the window on the right and all locations of the texture map are listed below. If duplicated texture maps exist the user can scroll through all the duplicated texture maps and see what the differences are and quickly explore to the locations and weed out the incorrect files. Once the correct file is located the user can click on "Use selected path" and the script will update the material with path of the selected texture map. If the user is in a hurry "Auto path" select the first path found in each missing file.


 

 

Check Hierarchy

      The check hierarchy tool will compare the animation hierarchy of all the maxfiles in a directory to the maxfile that exports the ingame hierarchy. Then saves a log file off with all possible problems in each maxfile. Possible problems include: Missing bones in animation file(kf), Bone not found in export file (nif), Duplicate names, ect.

 

 

Biped Picker

      The Biped Picker allows the user to easily pick a bone of the biped. The biped does not even have to be visible for the script to work. This makes it easy to animate with the character skin and not be distracted by the bones of the character.

 

3The Biped is represented by colored blocks matching the color of biped. This makes it easy to know what side of the character you are picking. The selection blocks are dynamic and represent the actual structure of the biped. If the biped had only one spine link then only one spine bone will be in the picker.

3The white block is the biped bone that is currently selected.

3By double clicking on a block, the children of the same part will be included in the selection. For example, double clicking on the spine base the picker will select all the spine bones.

3By clicking on a block while holding Shift the bone will be added to the selection. By double clicking while holding Shift the entire part will be added to selection. For example, if the left arm is selected and the user wants to add the entire right arm to the selection. The user just needs to hold shift and double click on the Clavicle of the right arm.

3By clicking on a block while holding ALT the bone will be removed from the selection. By double clicking while holding ALT the entire part will be removed from the selection.

3To select the entire character the user just has to double click on the COM.

3By Each of the black blocks represents a pivot of the locked keys. By clicking on these, the locked key's pivot will be changed to the corresponding pivot.

 

Website Creator

          The Website Creator is a personal tool I made for generating and updating a website quickly and easily. My entire website was generated in Maxscript. It works by looking at a directory structure. Each folder in the directory is a new menu item. It then looks at the folder and determines what kind of page to create. It automatically generates the menu images in all three states, Normal, Disabled and highlighted. It decides how to create a table and cut it up to place the images. It also generates the thumbnails, normal and large images for each image in the portfolio. It then generates the HTML code for each page and saves it off all the pages ready to be uploaded to the server. There is no work on my part for updating the website other than copying a new image or text file into the correct folder and starting the script.

      Aside from my own website being generated by the Website Creator. My wife's websites are also generated by the script
www.TiffannyVarga.com and Tiffanny'Portfolio. They look very different from my own showing off the different looks that can be achieved by the script.

(C) Stephen Varga 2011 Contact