About PJanssen
Outliner
Version:
1.61
Date Updated:
09/23/2008 
Revision 19-09-2008: Version 1.6
Revision 07-08-2008: Version 1.5
Revision 09-03-2008: Version 1.4
Revision 31-01-2008: Version 1.3.6
Revision 30-01-2008: Version 1.3.5
Revision 28-01-2008: Version 1.3
Revision 14-01-2008: Again, preference default setting fix. (For problems with the outliner not showing up)
Revision 10-12-2007: Preference default setting fix.
Revision 06-12-2007: Speed improvements, restructured UI and minor changes.
Revision 03-12-2007: New Features, bug fixes and minor changes.
Revision 01-12-2007: Major bug fix. Script should work now...
Description & Features:
I've written this tool mainly because I find the existing selection tools in 3dsmax very poor and rather unpractical. The main goal was to create a tool which gives you a good hierarchic overview of the objects in your scene, and enables you to quickly select objects (with a single click!). Next to that, I wanted to make object parenting/linking more intuitive and easy.
- Tree view display of scene and hierarchy.
- Layer and Hierarchy mode.
- Single click object selection.
- Drag & Drop object linking and grouping.
- Simple object selection within groups.
- Object renaming.
- Filter by object type.
- Select objects by name.
- Visual representation of object type (icons).
- Parent highlighting (green).
- Hidden objects are still shown, in grey text.
- Window can be kept open all the time.
Installation:
- Close 3dsmax.
- Remove any old version.
- Start 3dsmax.
- Drag & Drop the .mzp file into max to install.
- In the customize user interface dialog, you'll find a Outliner window toggle' command, under the catagory 'Outliner'.
- Assign
it to a hotkey, quad menu, toolbar or whatever you prefer. I personally
have it set under the h key, to replace the standard selection dialog. - Optionally assign the additional macroscripts to keys, for example the hide or freeze toggles.
Known issues:
- The script can not be used in 3dsmax versions lower than 9, because it uses a dotNet treeview object.
- Merging objects that replace existing objects can cause problems.
- The scrollwheel doesn't work anymore due to the hotkey focus change.
- Undo-ing actions related to groups don't work properly.
- Undo-ing a delete action doesn't restore the hierarchy. Refresh the tree to fix this.
- The outliner can occasionally, in some unknown circumstances crash max when opening.
- Object conversions and XRefs can not be detected by the outliner. Only manually refreshing will fix this.
If you happen to run into any bugs, be sure to let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.
Version Requirement:
9.0
Homepage URL:
http://www.threesixty.nl
Download URL:
http://script.threesixty.nl/outliner/outliner_1_6_1.zip 
Comments
Hm yes those icons are fairly
Hm yes those icons are fairly ugly indeed. I should fix that. I also see the problem with the space being wasted, I'll take care of that.
I don't have a release date planned, I'm currently trying to gather some feedback:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=843266
Perfect and many thanks. Here
Perfect and many thanks. Here I have a screenshot for you, where I meant the "visual bug" if using max dark theme + width wasting space.
The Icons are not so much annoying but the width is really wasting much space.
Any Release Date for the new version?
cheers.
Allright some more -admitted
Allright some more -admitted rather late- response to a couple of feature requests posted here. (I hope you guys are still following this):
@3dwannab: "Was just wondering if you could add a open and close group to the right click context menu"
I must have misunderstood this at the time, because what the outliner actually rather smartly does with groups, is open and close them automatically! So you can select any object inside a group without having to open it manually first. And when you select another object outside the group, the group will be closed again.
Ergo, there is no need to have this in the context menu.
@IN_human: "I really miss option to select all objects from layer"
Selecting a layer in the outliner essentially does select all objects in that layer. So there is no need to have this as a separate option.
The "object properties"
The "object properties" feature is a good idea. And it was very easy too implement too, took just a minute. So that'll definitely be in the next release.
The same goes for the freeze layer feature, that was a fairly easy one to implement.
Concerning renaming the default layer: I don't know why max restricts this. It makes sense to block deleting it, but it's name shouldn't really matter at all you'd say. I can only assume that because of some odd design decision they refer to the base layer through it's name, rather than with a reference to the layer object. But that's just guesswork. For all we know, we really can't rename and we'll have to live with that.
Thanks again for your input, it's very valuable.
Hi Pier thanks for
Hi Pier
thanks for responding. I hope that you still work on this beautiful script! Waiting for upcoming releases :)
Maybe you could also add a "object properties" function, if right clicking on a object in the outliner window, just like in the standart max layer manager...+ layer freezing option would be great.
I dont know why but max restricts renaming the first layer...checked the original max layer manager too and the first layer cannot be renamed....maybe you know why this restriction is there!
anyways, thank you very much.
Thanks for the
Thanks for the input.
-Scrolling is a known issue, but annoyingly isn't be fixable.
-starting the outliner with max used to be an option, but was removed a few versions ago. The reason for this is that the outliner sometimes instantly crashes max, for unknown reasons. This seemed to happen more frequently when it was opened on startup. So even though the idea of the feature was definitely useful, it did cause too much problems.
Here I have made a little
Here I have made a little bug/featurerequest list:
- Scrolling does not work
- 3ds Max Theme Icons look weird if using black max theme (white outlined icons)
- Freezing Layers n/a
- width slimming n/a
- feature request: start outliner with max (automatically) + remember/consider user defined size, alignment on start etc.
performance is good so far.
just my 2 cents...hope you rework it if you have time.
Great work.
Thanks for your comment. I'm
Thanks for your comment. I'm glad to hear you like the script so much.
About your feature requests: the layer freeze option shouldn't be too hard to add. If I have time I'll do it.
Allowing a slimmer UI (without screwing it up too much) is doable of course, but will take some time.
I'm currently considering maybe writing the outliner as a plugin, using C++ and the SDK. That should get rid of any problems regarding speed (well, many of them at least), and maybe get rid of the incidental mysterious crashes when opening the outliner too.
Brilliant script! Very
Brilliant script! Very useful and very nice!
But I have a urgent feature request :D
Please make it so that we can set the window size smaller than in the actual version...the width is resizable but it is restricted because of the buttons...maybe you could re align the buttons at the bottom so that we can set the width size smaller...
+ a layer freeze option would be cool too...object + groups are freezable but layers not.
thank you very much and sorry for my crappy english.
very nice
very nice