Teamwork
ZOA’s flagship maxscript is part of a development project going on since two years now, and has been created to help our studio work together on a project.
If you want to use ZOA’s teamwork you not just have to understand the different functionalities of the script itself, but probably also how our studio works.
We tried to work our ways through xreffing but it didn’t seem to fit our needs. Unlike Xrefs ZOA’s teamwork is a democratic tool without the need of a leader who pulls the pieces together.
The principle is that each team member is working on his own set of layers. The script actually saves your work by saving layers to individual *.max files. Then it builds scenes from individual layers either for further manipulation or for rendering.
The script creates a working environment to use a directory-like sub-layer system through a delicate dotnet window.
Notes and limitations
1. The script is highly sensitive to layer naming. Don’t use spaces, hyphens and any other characters that you would not use in a filename.
2. There’s an “owner” column for showing who is working with a specific layer. This feature is under construction. As our studio is on 70 square meters, there simply was no need for finalizing that. If in doubt: screaming helps.
3. Material instantiation is lost when saving to different layers and merging back. Try to keep this in mind when building up the scene-structure.
4. You need to work on mapped network drives for the script to work properly.
With comments and critiques please contact any of the two persons whose email you see at the beginning and the end of the above video.