In the last few months I have been designing a custom toolset for 3D Studio Max 2012, and made it commercial. Though I never thought of adding engine specific tools to it, as I am only using a single engine. That has changed, and is also the reason why I post my tool here for show and interest.

The toolset we as SnowCloud Entertainment created is a complete package toolset which allows you to improve the workflow in 3D Studio Max greatly. Tools include but are not limited to:

• Color Overrides
• Pivot Operations
• Stone / Rock Generator
• Wooden Planks Generator
• Physics Animations
• Keyframed Physics Animations
• Demolition Tool
• Persistent Notes
• Auto Save
• Auto Back-ups and Manual Backups
• Version Control System
• Authentication System
• Personal Information
• WhiteBox Importer (HE)
• Scene Analyzers
• Esenthel Bone Renaming
• ... More
  

The tool was not intended to be used by other artists outside of our team, but we decided to release it as a commercial product a few months ago.

I got the idea of creating custom tools for Esenthel, well, because it is fairly easy with my team to make this. If you have any feature requests, then don't hesitate to tell me, and I will most likely add it to the tool.

My personal goal is to make this THE toolset artists will use, and I want to try and include as much as possible and organized on a Main usability and engine specific usability.

For more information about the tool, visit our Projects page here, and contact me if you are interested:

Congrats on releasing this toolset. I'm not an artist so can't really comment on it but wish you luck promoting it. I'm sure if it's as good as it looks and sounds it will be successful!

It sounds like a good tool, but sadly it involves 3ds studio max. Which is lovely in student version, but if I'd want to do something commercial with it it would cost me a fortune. So we use Blender instead. If however your tool worked in blender also, it just might be worth 30$ for us

//either way, great tool.

I am not even sure if Blender allows for custom plugins... The logic of the code stays the same, but again, it has certain limitations that the products from Autodesk do not... :(

(07-08-2013 12:07 PM)Dwight Wrote:  I am not even sure if Blender allows for custom plugins... The logic of the code stays the same, but again, it has certain limitations that the products from Autodesk do not... :(

Limitations? Blender? Oh my, Dwight..

You could change everything about Blender if you wanted to. I'm not even going to mention the entire program being open-source.

If you just want to make plug-ins for it, they're made in Python and they pretty much allow you to do anything you want.

Nonetheless, congrats on your plug-in.

Why do people say that blender has limitations? Where do people get this kind of information? Hehe....I have to give you a hard time Dwight. You must not use blender much. There is nothing wrong with using blender...it can do just as much as Autodesk. It gets a bad reputation because it's not the industry standard, and never will be. It is completely open source, community driven, and big companies would never dare use something that is free. I have seen plug-ins for Blender Game Engine that would actually make it a AAA game engine if you added them all together. I have seen plug-ins that use lip sync to audio for voice animations that make it just as advanced as Maya. Those are only a few examples of what I have found. Once you add it all up, you can customize your blender to actually be more advanced than the overly priced Autodesk products. So if you are an indie dev, starting a small company, why waste money on 3d studio max? Unless you are using a different engine that requires it, I don't see the point.

I have very little experience of my own, and while I AM a Blender fan, I can still tell you why people don't like it: controls are very sloppy, it took me 15 minutes before I managed to move the camera around my object and just as much to move the object.
Undo is very limited, that's really a shame, sine undo is one of the greatest wonders of working with computers. And mapping texture is also quite a pain in the ass.

Besides that, long live Blender ) It's really awesome, and along side with GIMP it's one of the softwares that make me think free stuff is often better quality than payed stuff.

Well, we develop our game on an engine that uses a pipeline that is bound to either Maya or Max, because it is the industry standard. Blender still cannot compete on some parts with Autodesk, nor will it ever, sadly :(

Because of this, I probably won't develop our toolset for other tools (read: Blender), as we don't need it. This is just something we released unintentionally to help other artists and professionals in the field.

tell me what Max can do that blender can't, and I bet I can find a blender plug-in that can do it.

Calculate physics of a shattered object and automatically skin that with bones and keyframes them into a usable animation !

Thus: skin and keyframe a physics calculation.

I fear this is degenerating into a war between 3D Max and Blender which detracts from what Dwight and his team have actually done here.

He's stated that this was very much a by product of the fact they work with Max and Maya and not something that was designed purely with the intention of selling it as a tool to a broader market place.

Whilst I personally like Blender and do think a lot of people underestimate its capabilities the comparison here is pretty meaningless; as I'm guessing unless someone is willing to pay Dwight a lot of money he isn't about to start writing a blender interface for his tools when that brings no benefit to him or his team!

(07-09-2013 10:04 PM)Pixel Perfect Wrote:  I fear this is degenerating into a war between 3D Max and Blender which detracts from what Dwight and his team have actually done here.

He's stated that this was very much a by product of the fact they work with Max and Maya and not something that was designed purely with the intention of selling it as a tool to a broader market place.

Whilst I personally like Blender and do think a lot of people underestimate its capabilities the comparison here is pretty meaningless; as I'm guessing unless someone is willing to pay Dwight a lot of money he isn't about to start writing a blender interface for his tools when that brings no benefit to him or his team!

Most of the custom work I did was added to the toolset as is. People with subscriptions have the chance to bug me for certain features they want to have. There's already a few members here from Esenthel who have a lifetime subscription now

If the features are good for most of the users of the tool, I will implement them. Custom tools I just make for fun for my colleagues

(07-09-2013 08:22 PM)Dwight Wrote:  Calculate physics of a shattered object and automatically skin that with bones and keyframes them into a usable animation !

Thus: skin and keyframe a physics calculation.

I believe you can already do that with blender. You have to use the BGE, and export it from there to get it to work. Pixel Perfect...I wouldn't worry about this degenerating the conversation since there are only like 4 or 5 people that even blog here regularly.

Nor are there many people who can discuss things without derailing too much. Shatterstar brings up interesting points of discussion, however our specific engine choice does not allow for FBX support and uses their own custom tools.

As Pixel Perfect mentioned, this was a by-product to make the life of our own inhouse artists easier (redmine integration sometime in the future); if other people can get any advantage from this tool or my knowledge, I am glad to share it; just making sure server costs are not too much

I think it is awesome what your team has created!!! These are great features to have!