Overview: 

This plugins exports the curretnly selected objects to a series of numbered ASCII files. Major use is for converting a series of frames into a Quake or Quake 2 Model.



There are currently two versions of ASCMaker out there, one for 3DS Max 1.2, and one for 3DS Max R2. Make sure you got the right one!



To make the plugin available to 3dsmax, put the ASCMAker.dlu into one of your plugin directories. The two standard ones are STDPLUGS, and PLUGINS off the 3dsmax home directory. 



After you put them in there, and new utility will show up in the Utility Panel, called Ascii Maker. When you choose this utility, a single button is there called "Save Selected". 



To export you animation to ascii files, select the objects you wish to export, and click the "Save Selected" button in the Ascii Maker Utililty. A Dialog box appear asking for a filename. The file name you choose will be appended with 000 through to 999, depending on how many frames you have.



The exporter exports the frame range of the current time segment, and will number the files with the starting and finished of that frame. The export does not take into account frame rate, or anything, it just exports each and every frame



Q2 Modeller users:

To import your newly created group of ascii files, start a new model. The first step is to set up the vertices and triangles in your model, so go File->Import->Append Vertices...

And then choose any file in you group of ascii files.



The frame you chose should come up for viewing, but with no skinnin information or anything. All you've got is one frame of a model, and thats it.



The next step is to chuck the rest of the frames in. To do this go File->Import->Append frames...



And then choose the frames in _reverse_ order. This is the order than files are inserted into the dialog box list, so unfortunately you have to do it this way. Also, there is a limit to the number of characters in the filenames, so if you have a large number of files to import, a solution is in the works. If your files are a few directries under your root, there may be a limit of 10 or 15 files at a time, so unfortunately, you have to import them in chunks at a time. Another solution is to move the files so they are in a less removed directory, such as c:\d\



Now all the frames should be available in the modeller, and the next step is to skin the thing. So I'll leave that up to you!







