My studio has tasked me with creating a dummy proof animation preview button for the animators, and I’ve yet to come up with something that works. I tried modifying the quick screen grab code that’s been around in the maxscript tuts for a while, but it looks kinda ugly and the studio wants it cropped properly instead of using the viewport dimensions because they can throw it into the edits as placeholders until the final render is done.
I can use the updated controls for the createPreview command, but it’s kind of useless without being able to access and assign the proper codec, file type, name and location. I spent a large chunk of time yesterday digging around the Max files trying to location the script for the make animation preview rollout to see what commands it uses to set these, but I couldnt find it.
Last night after work I thought about cheating and let Max blast out an AVI in the previews folder and then have it copy the file, rename it, and delete the old one. That just seems like extra work when it appears that the preview rollout allows you to directly save out a .mov file. Even if this is what I have to do, there still isn’t any way to directly assign a codec and compression level in the event an animator has been messing with the settings.
Anyone have any advice on this? Basically the studio wants a tool where the animators hit a button and it creates a .mov playblast named based on the file in the same directory as the file. I can script all this stuff with the render settings and have developed various file save systems, but I’ve never worked with the anim preview settings because before 2013 there were no controls to access it.