HitchHiker - A Dynamic Thumbnail control for 3dsMax

So what is it?

HitchHiker is a VB DotNet / 3dsMax User Control and is designed to
provide automatic thumbnailing of directories containing a variety of
media types. This can be employed in a variety of situations as it is
designed to provide a fast and simple method of building a fully
functional asset browser or similar media browsing utility. HitchHiker
only needs instruction of which directory to look in, and it will build
an interface that allows you see the folder’s contents in a choice of
different views. It is easy to configure the display layout according
to presets accessible in the control, or is fully customisable with a
bit of scripting to look the way you would like. It’s a DotNet
equivalent to Rollout Creator. The advantage of using something like
this is that the display logic is already built in, leaving the task of
integrating it into 3dsMax a simple one, even for someone with very
little scripting experience. It is also able to load image types not
normally available to a DotNet assembly.

Usage

HitchHiker inherits the MaxUserControl class, a DotNet class that
Autodesk added to 3dsMax as part of their DotNetSDK. It also uses the
functionality of the ManagedServices.dll included in 3dsMax. This means
that you can only use this user control in the 3dsMax environment.

It is compatible with both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of max, but you will need 3dsMax 2010 in order for it to work.

Hitchhiker is free, all I would ask is that if you use it for something useful or cool, give a credit as to where it was from!

Supported Formats and Third party Image Libraries

If you are familiar with how windows uses various image file
formats, you’ll notice that there are several image types that windows
will not open, but are useful to a 3D Artist. Most notably this is
Targa, RPF and PSD. In order to open these file formats via DotNet, you
would usually be tied to using a custom image library such as FreeImage
or ImageMagick. This would add an extra deployment assemblies. However
the biggest issue is when used on a 64 bit platform. I have found it
difficult to find an x64 compatible image library that will let me
integrate into Visual Studio and 3dsMax without a large configuration
headache.

With this in mind, HitchHiker uses a two step approach.

Image formats that windows natively opens, like JPG, PNG and TIF are
generated as part of a threaded GDI+ process within the control. These
are subsequently fast to return, and keeps the UI thread of max
separate.

Non-windows formats are opened in 3dsmax by registering a bitmap
loading function with the MaxScriptSDK methods in the
managedservices.dll. The 3dsmax bitmap is then passed back to the
control via the clipboard as a DotNet bitmap where they are processed
in a non threaded environment. The thumbnailing routine is still
performed in the assembly rather than Max as by this point the bitmap
is in the correct bitmap format for the control to use. You are simply
using the 3dsMax Image readers to plug the gap in DotNet file types.

This is all made possible via the enhancements to the managedservices.dll.

It struck me as odd that I was struggling with 3^rd party
image libraries, 3dsMax had the means to open these non-compatible
formats. However it wasnt an option until 3dsMax 2010, when the
MaxscriptSDK was introduced into the DotNetSDK. This is my first
control i have built that registers all of the 3dsMax image function
handling via the DotNet control instantiation. I have talked about this
on my site before so you will hopefully be aware of some of the things
you can do with it.

See the diagram for more details -

This is the neatest way of integrating custom Image types into
DotNet I can think of for the time being - I would hope in the future,
Autodesk would include a method for this in the DotNetSDK as it would
significantly enhance custom control and UI development.

Hithiker needs no external image dependancies, I have embedded the
icons and UI images into the resources.resx file in the assembly.

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How to Use HitchHiker

Hitchhiker is a DotNet UserControl and the easiest way to use it is
on a rollout as a DotnetControl. You will need to load the assembly
first, using the dotnet.loadassembly method, pointing it to the
directory that you have copied hHitchHiker to.  A simple rollout
integration is as follows -

It’s actually quite straightforward. You call the Populate method with a path string. You then handle the clicked icon with the ThumbPicked event. This has a property called filename,
which is the currently selected file. (Should you wish to refer to this
info outside the event you can get the filename from the hitchhiker.currentitem() property)

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Methods

There are only a couple of actual public functions you can call on the control. You have already seen how you call populate(string) to set the control running. When this has been performed, you can call .getfiles() to get access to the file array in the same way you can in 3dsMax.

The other method available is CurrentImage(Multiplier as single)

This returns an dotnet image object of the current file, useful when
using HitchHiker with a picturebox control. Large images can be resized
with interpolation to speed the loading of the return image, or to give
a low-res preview. If you want the original image, call this function
with a multiplier of 1.0

The multiplier acts like an image size adjustment, the returnimageinterpmode property is what quality the image is drawn at.

There are a few properties to customise the layout of how HitchHiker displays the thumbnails. These are detailed next.

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Properties

The following properties can be set on the control. For the
examples, I am using the word HitchHiker to represent the instance of
the control in your script, this is whether it is part of a 3dsMax
rollout or a DotNet form class within 3dsMax.

.ButtonBackColor and .ThumbPanelBackColor

Changes the Button/Panel background colour independently to the rest of the control.

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.CurrentItem

Returns the full path (including filename) of the current or last selected item.

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.CurrentMapFolder

Returns only the path of the current or last selected item.

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.DisplayStyle

This is an Enum to set the style of the display. Note the use of the + sign when instantiating an Enum via Mascript.

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.FileType

Enum to set the file type that HitchHiker searches for in the
folder. If HitchHiker.RecursiveSearch is set to true, then Hitchhiker
searches in all sub folders. If not, then it searches just the
specified directory. When set to AVI, Hitchiker displays the frame
halfway through the file, so that you avoid black frame thumb previews.

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.Gap

Value to set the spacing between the buttons on the HitchHiker
panel. Property exposes the margin property of the embedded flowlayout
panel.

Default:0

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.ImageAlign

Property for controlling the Image layout position on each button within the control.

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.TextAlign

Property as above but for controlling the Text layout position on each button within the control.

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.RecursiveSearch

Set to true to search subdirectories in the supplied directory. If
set to False, only the main directory specifed is searched.
Default:False

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.ReturnImageInterpMode and .ThumbInterpMode

Other enum interpolation types -

.Bicubic

.Bilinear

.Def

.High

.HQBicubic

.HQBilinear

.Low

.Nearest

This property is identical to ThumbInterpMode. It decides what
quality GDI bitmap is returned. Different settings for this can
increase thumbnailing speed at the expense of quality. If using to make
an image browser, you could experieemnt with setting the
ThumbInterpMode to low and the ReturnImageInterpMode to bilinear. This
way, the control would generate the thumbs as quickly as possible but
allow the viewed image to be high quality.

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.SelectedBorderWidth

Value to set the width of the coloured outline around the active button on the HitchHiker panel.

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.SelectedHighlight

Value to set the colour of the border around the active button.

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.ShowMenu

Enabled the display of the right-click menu to change the filetype and refresh the UI (The red icon at the top of the menu)

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.ShowToolbar

The toolbar gives access to common operations within the control,
and allows the user to change directory, and search and display
parameters. It is small format so that when used in the Max command
panel, it can operate in the 160 pixel width neccesary for the panel.

HitchHiker Toolbar Options

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.ShowTooltips

Displays detailed image information. Look, TGA previews in DotNet!

This property calls a function that again uses managed services to
gain image information from the MaxScript method GetBitmapInfo(). The
information is then passed back to the dotnet assembly as a float,
string, integer or boolean value according to the property.

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.Sortby

Implements an Icomparer interface to provide custom sorting patterns for the resulting file array.

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.TextImagerelation

Another method of text layout in the button controls. This property
wraps the button property of the same name. For more control of the
layout of the text and image use the .textalign and .imagealign properties

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.Thumbnails

Sizes are as follows and are square.

Tiny = 24×24

Small = 50×70

Medium = 70×70

Large = 90×90

ExtraLarge = 150×150

These are to use as quick presets and are also used by the thumbnail
buttons on the toolbar. To specify a custom thumbnail size, use the .thumbsize property

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.Thumbsize

murray? Present.

Set a custom thumbnail size using this property. Useful if you want
to show a larger thumbnail, for example when previewing video files.
You may have noticed the filmstrip surround on the rollout. This was
something I added to the thumbnails so that it mimicked the way Windows
Vista displays video thumbnails in explorer.

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Possible Uses for HitchHiker

The obvious uss for Hitchhiker is as an
Asset Browser, but I thought I’d outline a way to use HitchHiker in a
simple rollout to load scene audio. the code is as follows -

this will give you the following utility - Control click the thumbnail to load the wavfile into as scene audio.

That’s it! I hope you find this control useful.

If you have any questions about usage, or
any bugs/suggestions, please mail me through the website contact page.
Please note that I will be updating HitchHiker periodically as I use it
in my character pipeline tools.  HitchHiker has been production tested
and works in x86 and x64 environments.

All I would ask in return is that if you use it for something useful or cool, give a credit as to where it was from!