Bendy limbs tutorial

A tutorial by Felix Joleanes that covers the creation of Bendy rigs in 3ds max. (thanks to JoDaC for the web link to that tutorial)

Protecting Your Own Intellectual Property?

"Your Own IP?" is one of the hot threads at CGTalk this week. The main question is how to protect your own work in progress IP (Intellectual Property).

It's not an easy task, right?
Here is a quote of Ali Ismail (I agreed with):

I haven't tried to register an IP for movie or a character yet but I had brief encounters with lawyers regarding trademarks and IPs in general and from that I can say things are pretty complicated.

for example regarding a trademark registration, lets say you have a studio name or any brand name for that matter, when you register that one you have to choose in what field to register it and in which country, the fields are too many and the countries are also too many :)

meaning its very very costly to register a worldwide brand or trademark.for example you could register a studio name in the USA but it doesn't mean that no one could use the same name and logo to sell Beer for example in the same country or to make an exactly similar studio in Berlin.or in another instance if you register your characters and someone in your country steals you idea, changes the look and name of the character slightly, it would be a costly matter to prove that he stole or damaged your IP.

in short, my advice is to keep your concepts and ideas as hidden as possible until the release. find a cheap way to register at least in your country so that you have some form of starting point and hope and wish that no big company will have interest in taking your ideas because you have little chance of standing against their lawyers because the more expensive your lawyers are the more legal and righteous you are in the eye of "justice".

Clear Reactor Collisions Data

Just small macro script (as quick assistance from me to user request at ScriptSpot forum) for debugging scenes, that auto clean embedded Reactor collisions data.

Apache web version of Backburner monitor

Very interesting (to me) tutorial by Alex York on how to setup the apache web version of 3ds Max's Backburner monitor.

My sincere gratitude goes to the Max Underground (the best source for 3ds Max news)
where I read a news about this article.

Sculptris Alpha 6

Sculptris Alpha 6 released (now with support for Mac OS X), and it is still FREE! I worried that after Sculptris was acquired by Pixologic will become commercial. Nice surprise :)

What's new announced at ZBrushCentral forum.
Sculptris download page.

Grab ViewPort Plus Alpha

It is my recent script for Max I ups at ScriptSpot (full details included there) that allows to grab the active viewport with embedded alpha channel.

Over 100 Free Particle Flow Presets

Amalgamation blog remind us that since the release 2010, 3ds Max has shipped with over 100 Particle Flow presets, created by Allan McKay specifically to ship with 3ds Max, and because they are not part of a default installation, Gary M. Davis showed how to install them and finally how to access them within 3ds Max.

Facima Tools

FACIMA Tools is a free script based plug-in for 3ds Max 2008 and higher by Alexey Vlasov for importing MoCap data from Pixel Farm PF Track.

Quad Cap

Quad Cap is new commercial script for 3ds Max by Marius Silaghi (the author of Quad Chamfer and Subdivision Reversion scripts), designed to produce quad caps for even sided polygons.

Scene file recovery

Two parts tutorial at MaxStation blog on how to recover max scene file that fail to open. The first part cover how to do that by hand and the second part - how to automate the process with MAXScript.

Quad Connect

Quad Connect is a script by Marius Silaghi that produce all quad connects.

Insanto's MaxScripts

I saw a time ago the web site of Raphael Steves when it was still in progress, but yesterday by chance I visit it again and now I see he post a lot of useful MaxScript functions and code snippets.

Procedural Snow

A new step by step tutorial by Cristian Pop (at CGTuts+) on creating snow cap over object using Particle Flow and Blob Mesh. It's probably very popular technique but worth to read it though.

MaxScriptManager

MaxScriptManager is a script by Norman Schaar that help to manage your installed scripts. A lot of features included inside... check your self. The big studios used repositores (data bases)... glad to see someone take care to work on such script for free :)

MXS Browser

MXS Browser is a personal script, an utility menu that I use all the time. I organize my most often used scripts into folders in Max/Scripts directory and this simple menu is all I need to find and run or edit them quickly.

Quad Chamfer

Quad Chamfer is a commercial script for 3ds Max 2010/12 by Marius Silaghi that offer better chamfer method than Max built-in one.

3ds Max SDK Annual Survey

3ds Max SDK Annual Survey and Highlights from Last Year's Results posted at Christopher Diggins blog. If you're Max SDK developer don't miss that survey ;-)

Grab Viewport with transparent background

Max's Grab Viewport is just a screen capture tool, so we can't do this directly. However we can post-edit the image (in Photoshop for ex.) and remove the background, but some automation of this process is welcome and also recently requested in CGTalk forum.

The first attempt about was Kostadin Kotev's script (here), follows by Leslie Van den Broeck (here). Leslie just extent the first script with more features (additional renderer passes), nice but the base solution is the same. This can be optimized to run about twice more faster, but the base part (process the bitmap per pixel) will remain too slow.

We (me and Kostadin) discuss an better idea and will work on it soon (I hope), so if you interested stay tuned.

Vue 9.5 xStream and Infinite PLE

The Personal Learning Edition (PLE) of E-on Vue xStream and Infinite updated to version 9.5 (all new features).

Visibility Assistant

A simple script by Pete Addington to facilitate setting visibilty keys on objects.
I'm an admirer of mapped functions in MaxScript and use them then it is possible, so am glad to see Pete has set his focus on them too.