I still have my old site online where you can grab some maxscripts like Verty or Distributy or read about some of my very first Virtools projects ! I setup that site in 2003 where auto-resizing/-centering pop-up windows for images were probably still state-of-the-art. Now it's totally old-school … hehe …
Anyways, I discovered but ignored for a while that the script didn't work anymore for Mozilla Browsers. I just had to add one condition to fix it for FireFox 2.x. I hope it works now for everybody (that has JS enabled) – if not let met know.
This year, it seems that there are not that many blog entries from me. I have tons of drafts in the back-end, but somehow lacking the time to finish them … some also might be outdated or obsolete due other blog entries. Some of them are Virtools related containing some workflow hints and one even with details about our one-click build pipeline that we use now for all our projects.
The problem is unfortunately, that I am not allowed to go into details for this kind of stuff. It boosted our productivity by a massive factor, … really massive. Virtools says that they are working with some of their customers to offer their pipeline solutions and consulting for others. Probably they mean Leviathan Games as they are a close partner and already published information about their pipeline. Their publication was also the reason I kicked our old system and designed a new pipeline and tool. We had assets reloading before using the webplayer and some custom DLLs but, besides it went incompatible with the new Virtools Life Player, it still was too much clicking and the iteration frequency still low. I didn't kicked it all out. We already used directories for classifying assets for the post-import processing step and it's still a major element besides identifiers in names.
I have an article draft were I talk about how to easily export components developed in a sandbox CMO as part of a team or development workflow. It's from the pre 4.0 Selection-Set area and certainly nothing new for advanced users, but maybe there are still some 3.5 or 3.0 users, that might find that information useful. I'll try to publish this one soon.
Some time ago I also modified the occlusion manager. Though Virtools does not come with complete source codes, they fortunately include a larger amount of BuildingBlock and Manager sources in the SDK. I only wish I would less often have to dig into these.
The docs say that the occlusion manager may take a lot of processing time if there are too many occluders. So my first thought was to add and remove occluders according to some scene analysis. But the manager rebuilds the hull each time you assign the attribute – so not the best thing to do frequently. Therefore I modified it so I can enable and disable occluders without the penalty of rebuilding a hull. Moreover I added a special occluder type: ghost occluders. The object is invisible but still acts as occluders – useful if you want to simplify a hull even more by using a custom proxy object/mesh.