If you’re working with multi-shot animations this will make your life a lot easier! You can now create, view and tweak an edit directly inside 3dsMax. All this in an artist friendly way comparable to working in After Effects or Premiere. Quickly export previews or render clips directly from the timeline.

Main features:

• Sequence camera shots and/or Statesets.
• Adds a ‘Timeline Navigation Bar’ comparable to the one found in After Effects.
• Easy preview and render functions, quickly create previews and setup renders from a clip’s context menu.
• Token based render/preview system
• Does not get in your way when you are not using it, collapses to only show the time navigation bar.
• Automatically set the camera’s wireframe color to indicate if a camera’s track is selected or if camera is active.
• MaxScript access to the sequence data for integrating into existing pipelines and render managers.
• Sequence data is saved in the max file itself in a non disruptive way. This means the scene will just open fine even when the sequencer is not present on the system.
• Intelligent viewport handling, it will only activate a camera when there is a camera viewport present. So it will not force a camera view when for example you are working in a top-left-front-perspective layout.

Install

Drag and drop the .mzp file onto max to run the installer. On some systems this is not working due to user rights settings. In that case go to ‘MaxScript’ -> ‘Run Script’ in Max’s main menu and select the .mzp file and it will install.

Additionally a macro is created under the ‘JDBgraphics’ category so you add a button to a toolbar or ribbon panel to toggle the sequencer.

Currently Max 2013 and 3dsMax 2014 are supported and fully tested.

Main controls

Hide/Show
Expands or collapses the sequencer, when collapsed you will only see the yellow time navigation bar which takes up very little space and provides a quick way of getting around the timeline.

Sync
When ‘on’ this will sync the sequencer timeline with Max’s native timeline

Active
When ‘on’ ProSequencer will switch between cameras and/or StateSets on playback/scrubbing trough time.

Align
This will make the sequences the same width/position as Max’s native timeline. Use this when you dock a panel to the left and the sync gets off. (note: for now this will only work when you have a 1(maximized) or 4 viewport layout)

Setup
Here you adjust important settings and enter your license key, see ‘Setup’ chapter further down on this page.

Navigation

The yellow bar indicates the working area of the total animation range.

-Drag it, or move it’s left/right handles, to adjust the working area.
-Double click zooms out to 100%
-Shift-double click sets the working area so all clips are in view.

Additionally you can navigate as if you would do in a viewport, the mouse wheel zooms in/out and by pressing the middle mouse button on any of the tracks you can drag the working area left/right.

You can adjust the total animation range as you would normally do in max, the sequencer’s navigation bar will adapt to it automatically.

Setup

Preview output:
When you create a preview for a sequenced clip(s) they are renamed and placed at the location specified here. You can use one of the listed tokens to include the camera name into the path or file. Max normally creates all previews under the same ‘_scene.avi’ file, ProSequencer renames/moves this file after is has been created to the specified location. If this location does not end with ‘.avi’ it will be appended automatically..

Codec tip: http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html. It’s a lossless codec that supports RGBA, great for when your Nitrous previews are used as final output. You can edit them quickly in After Effects or Premiere including the alpha channel for compositing.

Nitrous preview quality:
Sets the amount of iterations per frame use for making previews.

Render output base path:
This is the location that is used to prefill the renderoutput dialog when a render action is clicked in a clip’s context menu. You can use one of the listed tokens to include the camera name into the path or file. If this path does not end with a ‘/’ it will be appended automatically.

License key:
Here you can enter the license key and active it.

Clips

Active clip
The top most clip under the red time indicator is the ‘active clip’, a linked camera and/or StateSet will be activated when scrubbing through time or on playback.

Adjusting
-You can adjust a clips timing by dragging it or by moving it’s left/right handles.
-Hold down shift while dragging a clip to activate the snap feature.
-Double clicking a clip selects it’s camera. When it’s a targetCam it will first select both camera and target, double click again will select the camera only, again the target only.
-Alt-drag will move both clip and the camera’s keys.
-Ctrl-click will send the tracks camera to the active viewport.

label
The clip’s label indicates start, length, end and camera if size allows. When this does not fit this data will be truncated down, zoom in to view more details.

Context menu
The clip’s context menu is where you setup the clip and perform certain actions, they are self explanatory. (this screenshot is not the most recent one, a few more option have been added since)

StateSets

A powerful feature is to link a StateSet to a clip. This can for example be used to hide objects in certain shots and show it in others. Or disable a turbosmooth modifier in a shot where an object is far away from the camera.

To link a StateSet you first set a state to ‘active’ (green arrow) and then from a clip’s context menu you select ‘link current stateset’. It will ask you if you want to rename the StateSet to match your camera for easy housekeeping. When an active clip has no StateSet linked it will deselect any active states and revert to the ‘base’ state.

One thing to lookout for is when you record a state you can accidentally record ‘time’ and/or ‘viewport’ modifications, these you will have to manually delete from a StateSet to insure proper operation of the sequencer. So make sure when a state is activated it does not change the current time or set the viewports to another view, let the sequencer handle those.

Saving/loading

This happens automatically* when you save/load you max file. The sequence data is saved within the Max file in a non disruptive way. You will have no problems when opening a scene containing sequencer data on a workstation that has not got the sequencer running or when rendering on a farm.
(*saving is disabled in the demo version)

TD friendly: Integrate into existing pipeline/render manager

When the sequencer is running you can get all the track data in an array with structs:

data=ProSequencer.getSequenceData()
track_count=data.count
showproperties data[1]

output:
id:<data>; Public
cam:<data>; Public
statesetId:<data>; Public
clipStart:<data>; Public
clipEnd:<data>; Public
clipLength:<data>; Public
selected:<data>; Public
enabled:<data>; Public

Misc

Camera colors
ProSequencer automatically sets the camera’s color to indicate a few things:
-default blue: not being used
-yellow: camera is linked to currently selected track
-red: camera is linked to active clip and used in the viewport.

Renaming
When you rename a camera, the track label and/or linked StateSet are renamed as well. If a StateSet is linked it will only be renamed if it matches the old camera name.

Output folder
Non existing output folders will be created automatically when required so make sure they are created in the right place, see ‘setup’ chapter on how to do this.

Uninstalling

Check the readme.txt in the downloaded zip. It lists where the files are copied to, remove those to uninstalled. (A proper uninstaller will come in a future update)

Thanks!

A big thank you to DenisT and everyone else who contributed in this thread at cgtalk which started the whole thing. (And to Dave Wortley for pointing me too it)

Questions/Bugs/Suggestion?

Feel free to contact me