Download Andrew Averkin’s free 3ds Max Assembly Tool
Nvidia senior art manager Andrew Averkin has released Assembly Tool, a fantastic set of free scripts and tools intended to speed up day-to-day workflow in 3ds Max.
It comprises a set of 33 scripts for everything from renaming assets to UV unwrapping, but particularly for shot layout and set dressing, with tools for painting assets into a scene and letting them settle under gravity.
Free scripts add brush-based and physics-based set dressing workflows to 3ds Max
Averkin describes Assembly Tool as a “massive set of useful scripts and tools” for 3ds Max intended to speed up day to day tasks like 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, and working with textures and materials.
However, its most eye-catching tools, shown to good effect in the demo video above, are the ones for scene assembly, shot layout, set dressing and object scattering.
With them, artists can add background objects to scenes simply by painting them in place – they snap automatically to underlying surfaces – using a similar brush-based workflow to edit their scale and rotation.
There are also tools for randomising the positions of objects, packing them into stacks, or for arranging them in grids and arrays for motion graphics-style workflows.
It’s even possible to add objects to a scene and let them settle naturally under gravity as you can with the new physics-aware layout tools in software like Houdini, Substance 3D Stager and Twinmotion.
The workflow looks similar to that in commercial add-ons like Kinematic Lab’s PhysX Painter, and is based on 3ds Max’s PhysX-based MassFX physics toolset.
Licensing and system requirements
Assembly Tool is free, including for commercial use, under ArtStation’s standard licence. It’s a set of 3ds Max MAXScripts and MacroScripts, and should work with recent versions of the software.
Read more about Assembly Tool in Andrew Averkin’s ArtStation gallery
Download Andrew Averkin’s amazing free Assembly Tool for 3ds Max