Bundling up scene and assets to pass off to another person.

#1

Hello everyone,

 I just wanted to see if anyone knows of or has heard of a option in 3DSmax 2012 that allows you to take all used information like the scene assets images, movie clips, textures, shaders, etc. and do a export out of max tha bundles them all up together to be passed off to another person. Not just in another department but more along the lines of another company. 

The company i work for is alway's getting pre created files from other companies that i may need to alter or fix. All of which have their own way of organising file structures etc. some having no organization what so ever. I'm just wondering if there is an option in Max to take these files and export out a standard clean copy that organizes all the files to a common file structure. Much the same as in AfterEffects if you use the Collect Files option from the files menu. It grabs all referenced files and organizes them so all you need to do is copy  the root to any new location and run the contained aftereffects file. It automatically links everything from that point instead of having files linked through random drive locations.

It’s not much work to point to another file location at the initial load of the scene when all the files are contained in a common location, but when multiple files are located in a lot of differen’t places and not all are the standard file structure it would be nice to have an option to have them do a collective export to send to us.

If anyone knows of such a thing i would greatly appreciate it.

#2

Interesting tutorial you got there.

Try File->Resource collector.

#3

Thanks for the reply,

I couldn’t find it under the file tab but using the term Resource collector I was able to track it down in the Utilities tab after selecting the More button. It’s not as organised as the Aftereffects version but does do the job.

After launching the scene file it brings in all textures applied with no searching to find them, and organises a copy of all the used textures etc into the same folder as the scene file. The biggest problem before was numerous paths from different people working on the same file and storing things everywhere from the assets image folder to their desktop.

Sometimes it’s just as simple as knowing what it is called.
Thanks again for the help.

#4

There’s another tool called Bitmap/Photometric Path Editor which searchs for missing files. You should try that too.

#5

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