Time Range Manager 1.5

Thank you for the interest.

Thank you for the interest.

Here's a more detailed explaination, I hope it helps...

Scene ranges saved into the TRM appear as selectable items in the dropdown list. They give you the ability to quickly (and immediately upon selection) set the time range start and end frames to the numbers indicated in the saved range. This provides an alternative to using the Time Configuration dialog manually, which can be cumbersome if you want switch between many ranges while working especially on long animations with lots of keys. As long time ranges can make the trackbar and trackview hard to edit, it’s best to try and focus on smaller ranges at a time.

You can save a scene range by giving it a name, as well as start and end frames. The frame times are independent from each other between saved ranges and they can overlap or have gaps, but the names must be unique. You can also save the full range using the F button, which is based on the min and max frames found by searching all the stored ranges.

Let’s say you are working on one long cinematic animation and want break down the full scene time range into easily editable chunks. You could separate parts of each shot into named ranges for the purpose of focusing on the keys more easily.

Example:

Opening_Shot_A 0-366

Opening_Shot_B 367-499

Middle_Shot 500-890

End_Shot 920-1208

Alternatively, if you are working on game animations and want to combine multiple sequences into one file for convenience, you can then store the ranges in the TRM. This will allow you to use it when editing the animations to quickly set the scene time range to the stored range for any saved sequence, so you can focus on it exclusively.

Example:

Idle_A 0-150

Idle_B 151-350

Walk 351-375

Run 376-390

When creating animations like this, you would manually add these sequences to the TRM as you edit them and keep it updated with the latest time changes for each sequence. This way you are in control of what is considered a sequence in terms of time within the overall time range. You store the collection of ranges into a Set which could be a single maxfile, but not necessarily as you can store them for generic use as well. You can then store Sets as a collection called a Project and you can have mutiple Projects.

You will need to open the Projects dialog to load a Set then open the Sets dialog to load the collection of ranges you want. It will update the stored ranges in the list using what is stored in that Set.

Example:

Project – “My First Movie”

Set – “Opening_shot”

Ranges:

Intro_A 0-321

Intro_B 322-560

The second part of the tool gives you the ability to transfer the saved ranges from the TRM to the scene Time Tags list (below the Max UI timeline) and back again, or out to a text file for easy editing.

This method works well with game animations stored in one file, particularly as you can script the ability to save out a bunch of sequences stored in the same file to separate files for batch exporting (if need be), by looking at each time tag in turn and using the frames stored in each as the time range for the saved scene. This was its intended use - however there may be other applications.