Turbosmooth iterations based on camera distance

check on john Wainwright's maxscript 101 lessons, there are some stuff on LOD topic!

Thanks you Raffix, it's what i done.

And after many hours watching john Wainwright's maxscript 101 lessons, maxscript's help and other tutorials i have a base script to control turbosmooth's iterations based on camera distance and a little bit more.

But in building the script, i got lot of ideas for usefull addons but i have some difficulties to integret them into the script.

First, i was thinking it would be cool that the script's reference object could be any type of object than just cameras. So i add a button for picking object but i don't know how to tell to the script to use this object for the distance function...

In a second time, i wanted to had an helper like the gismo's rotation to see directly in the viewport the distance entered in the script. So i added creation of three circles into the script but i don't find the command lines to assign them a position constraint targeted to the picked object...

That's what the script looks like so far :


--Turbosmooth Object Distance IterationsTool by Toondek :

start = animationRange.start
end = animationRange.end

-- Turbosmooth Object Distance Tool Dialog :

rollout TS_Object_Distance_Tool "Turbosmooth Object Distance Iteration Tool"
(
--Dialog Parameters :

pickbutton pbtn "Pick Object"
spinner dist "Distance Reference : " range:[0,1000,1]
spinner it_true "Iterations if True :" type:#integer range:[0,5,1]
spinner it_false "Iterations if False :" type:#integer range:[0,5,1]
button create "OK"

--Display the name of the Object on the button:

function SetObjNameAsBtnText obj pbtn =
(
if obj != undefined do
(
pbtn.text = obj.name
)
)

on pbtn picked obj do SetObjNameAsBtnText obj pbtn

on create pressed do (

--Turbosmooth Object Distance Tool Parameters :

-- Set Turbosmooth's iterations keyframe creation range
with animate on
for t in start to end by 1 do

-- Select geometry type of object in the scene
at time t
for obj in geometry do

-- Set reference distance to object
if distance $Camera001 < dist.value then

-- Set Turbosmooth's iterations if distance test = true
obj.Turbosmooth.iterations = it_true.value
else

-- Set Turbosmooth's iterations if distance test = false
obj.Turbosmooth.iterations = it_false.value

-- Helpers creation :

-- XHelper Creation :
Circle radius:dist.value name:"XHelper"
rotate $XHelper 90 y_axis
$XHelper.wirecolor = red
$XHelper.showFrozenInGray = off
Freeze $XHelper

-- YHelper Creation :
Circle radius:dist.value name:"YHelper"
$YHelper.wirecolor = green
$YHelper.showFrozenInGray = off
Freeze $YHelper

-- ZHelper Creation :
Circle radius:dist.value name:"ZHelper"
rotate $ZHelper 90 z_axis
rotate $ZHelper 90 x_axis
$ZHelper.wirecolor = blue
$ZHelper.showFrozenInGray = off
Freeze $ZHelper
)
)
createDialog TS_Object_Distance_Tool width:400