Script for randomising SPLINE segment material ids

[Terri Brown]

Hi guys,

 

I've got a Railclone system set up and I want to control objects placed on the spline by mat ids. Simple enough to do in RC itself, but the manual randomisation of the spline itself is what's getting to me. I have a complex spline with many many segments so it's taking time. Surely there must be a script out there to randomly assign mat ids to the segments of a spline. I looked on ScriptSpot but no luck. Downloaded spline-toolbox_v1.1 to just select random segments, but alas it works not.

 

I have RandomMatIds for POLYs but Splines...nudda.

 

Any suggestions? Or am I missing a button somewhere within max itself that does that?

13 years of using max and I don't know if there's that functionality.

 

 

Thanks guys

[Nicolai Bongard]

Ive not tried this, but a suggestion might be to select all the verteces, split them, then apply a material modifier to randomize by element as you would an editable poly, the add an edit spline modifer on top and weld all the verteces again?

[Simon Moir]

I think splines are tricky in Maxscript... You could use this script (edit: different to the one you tried, works for me in 2016) to randomly select segments and then assign IDs manually. Can you not do it in Railclone with the Random Node?

Edited December 4, 2017 by sjmoir

[jackbird]

This will randomize the material IDs on whatever shapes you currently have selected. Change the number in the first line of the script to set the number of material IDs.

 

This will work only on Editable Spline objects (not Lines or any other shapes).

 

highestMatID = 3 --change to set nmumber of random Material IDs to use
myShapes = for obj in selection where classof obj == SplineShape collect obj

for sh in myShapes do
(
for sp in 1 to (numsplines sh) do
(
	for sg in 1 to (numsegments sh sp) do
	(
		setMaterialID sh sp sg (random 1 highestMatID)
	)--end segment
)--end spline
)--end shape

[Terri Brown]

Thanks so much guys. I will definitely give that script a go Jon. Thanks too Simon (I downloaded the script), but I think Jon's script will be far more automatic.

[Simon Moir]

Works great... Thanks Jon.

[Hernan Rodenstein]

I know this is an old post but this can help others from now on:

 

Here's a great free 3dsMax script tool to randomize the material IDs in the selected splines.

 

Randomize Spline Material IDs - by SplineDynamics.com

[Terri Brown]

Stumbled apon this again after a year...script works a charm - thanks Hernan!

[Hernan Rodenstein]

We have launched a new 3dsMax plugin that is a great complement for all RailClone users.

 

SubSpline is an Advanced Subobject Selector & Material IDs Editor for spline shapes.

 

Website: http://www.splinedynamics.com/subspline/