
Welcome to Spline Cleaner, a set of powerful tools for cleaning, repairing and organizing spline curves in Autodesk 3ds Max!
INSTALLATION
- Unzip the content of the .zip file and then drag the “.mzp” file onto one of your viewports in 3ds Max . The plugin automatically installs itself.
- A dialog called “Software Activation” pops-up. Enter your license key in the text field. (You received 2 license keys by email when you purchased the product).
- If the license key is correct, Spline Cleaner will start.
- To add the plugin to a toolbar, go to the Menu > Customize > Customize user interface…
- Go to the “Toolbars” tab and pick the category “Spline Dynamics”.
- The plugin’s name, “Spline Cleaner”, must be listed there. Just drag it onto a toolbar and you’re done!
SPLINES INFO DIALOG
This plugin comes with an interactive tool called the Splines Info Dialog, wich displays very useful information about the selected shapes/splines.
We strongly recommend you to keep this dialog open everytime you manipulate spline curves to have an instant feedback about their changes.
- Draw some splines and shapes in your 3dsMax scene.
- Convert them all to Editable Spline (most of Spline Cleaner operations requiere Editable Splines to work. Otherwise you’ll get a warning message)
- Select the splines and open Splines Info Dialog (the topmost button).
- You’ll see there all the splines info: no. of shapes selected, no. of splines, segments, vertices, spline length, and more.
- Click the button Show/Hide Vertex Ticks to display all the spline vertices/knots.
- Make changes to the splines, add, delete and move vertices. Then re-select the splines or change the selection to update the splines info.
This tool can also make a diagnosis of possible errors on your splines, such as overlapping duplicates, double splines, overlapping vertices and empty shapes.
TOOLS, ROLLOUTS & QUICK HELP
If you scroll down the plugin’s interface (UI), you’ll see there are more tools and other rollouts.
The main tools are in the first rollout. In the rollout named More Tools there are some complementary tools, such as Flatten Splines.
In the rollout Basic Parameters, you will be able to change the basic parameters of all the selected splines at once. Try it!
On the right of every tool’s title there’s a question mark icon. When you place the mouse pointer over this icon, a tooltip with help appears. If you click it, in most of the cases, a dialog pops-up showing an extended help.
FIRST STEPS
To start trying the plugin, you can play arming and disarming shapes with many splines. You can do it very fast with Spline Cleaner.
Draw some shapes and splines and create some duplicates to have a bunch of curves. Use the tools Splines Info Dialog, Attach Selected, Explode and Weld Vertices to see how powerful this plugin is.
We hope you enjoyed Spline Cleaner. Check for more tutorials on this site!