Software > 3DS Max > Plugin News
SmartRefs beta
Jul 05, 2017 by CGPress Staff
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SmartRefs, a new external reference plugin for 3DS max, is now available in beta. The plugin allow users to modify and animate referenced objects, similar to the way that references work in Maya. The developers list several advantages over XRef, including:
- The ability to update modifications in object properties, changes in layers, assign or remove materials
- The ability to add or remove modifiers and even change applied modifier’s settings
- The ability to add controllers to the controllers list when the object’s transform is frozen and update changes to the transforms of objects that have no frozen transformation
- The ability to modify the materials in the master scene without merging them
- The ability to reference Biped rigs without causing troubles, even with the number of bones is changed
- The ability to remove objects from the source file
- The ability to make a proxy of the whole scene
- The ability to save referenced objects in the master file
- The ability to update changes in parenting of objects when one of the referenced object has been parented in the master file
- The ability to offset an object’s position,rotation and scale
- The ability to update the wireframe color of objects
- The ability to reduce the file footprint of scenes. For example, if the referenced file has 1000 objects and only one is modified, only that modification is saved in the master file. With Xrefs all the 1000 objects are saved
I’ve been lucky enough to have been testing this for the past month now and it has been Excellent. It has been the perfect tool for our pipeline and I can’t recommend it enough for team environments. When comparing it to Scene Xref’s and Object Xref’s it delivers the best of both worlds and adds tons of functionality, plus it is very easy to use.
Awesome!
I hope we can be parts of the Beta testing, and come out from the madhouse.
It’s really sad and unbelievable that Adesk wasn’t able to do something like this.
God bless you guys! 🙂
Very excited to see this, surprised it took so long for 3rd party referencing to make up for the terrible xref object and containers. Feature list looks really impressive, hope it isn’t cost-prohibitive…