[3D Studio Max] Setting project folder without adding default folders

Hi All,

We are currently in a co-producion of a 3D project with another animation studio and we are currently undergoing the transfer of assets for animation - as they are based in a separate geographic location.

We have setup all of our maxfile assets so they are looking to relative paths for textures and xrefs. When we open these files on another/new pc, we have to set the root or project folder in order for the relative paths to work correctly. However - every time we do this Max creates the default set of folders (autoback/scenes/images etc.) and it is not what we need.

Ideally everyones project folder should already be looking at the correct location (which is based in a universally recognisable path i.e. C:\PROJECTS\PROJECT_TITLE )

What is the best way to set this up for all of our artists that will be working on this project - whereby they won’t need to manually specify the project folder and evade the creation of these troublesome folders. Would it be through an edit of each INI file or is there a better way through automation?

Thanks!

you could try max script

pathConfig.setCurrentProjectFolder <ProjectPath>

docs for pathConfig

[QUOTE=Mambo4;27109]you could try max script

pathConfig.setCurrentProjectFolder <ProjectPath>

Thank you - I have tried this however with autoback set to enabled it pops an error every 5/10 mins saying that it cannot find the autoback folder in the newly assigned Project folder.

Ideally this as well as others (Images/scenes/exports) should stay looking at the default Max folder in the user documents and only use the project folder for relative paths.

I remember we investigated using project folders at one point in the past to try and figure out relative pathing, but it turned into a big pain because of all the manual fixups needed (I seem to recall that Max would automatically use fully-qualified paths by default any time you assigned a piece of content, necessitating a clean-up step before save to keep things relative.) Plus, of course, we had all the mess of the other project directories that you are hitting now that turns what should be a simple set-up into something much more unwieldy.

What we ended up doing was letting references be saved as absolute paths, and we just do a clean-up pass on post-load where we retarget those bits of content as relative to the user’s local root (as 3/4s of the content path structure is well-known - we basically just have to account for different drive letters and source control branch directories.) The weakness here is that file merges needed to be managed by one of our external tools, as the merge file callback events do not provide information about what file was merged in (which in our case complicates the way we retarget our paths, as they all come from Xml sidecar files.) Also, the post-load step comes in after Xref content, etc, is loaded, so I don’t know if retargeting after the fact will cause any scene complications in your scenario - in our case, it’s strictly for surfacing and shader parameters, so there’s no Xref dependencies or rigs, etc, that can break.