LosArt3D.com

This is an other repost from an old blog.. i figure i transfer it over 🙂

Ok, so i started updating some scripts that I’ve used tabs for, this is what i have found so far.

the dot net controller syntax for tabs is..

dotNetControl axList "System.Windows.Forms.Tabcontrol"

this makes a tab controller with the variable name of axList
the previous activeX controller would make the tab group and give you one default tab, this is not the same for dotNet tabs. in dotNet Tabs you have to create each tab your self.

adding new tabs is very easy, here’s the syntax to add tabs….

Tab = axList.tabPages.add "myAwsomeTab"

tab information can be access through “tabPages”, for example to query how many tabs there are in the tab controller you can do this…

numberOfTabs = axList.tabPages.count

to query individual tabs you have to use add “.Item” and then the index of the node you want to acess, (keep in mind that dot net controller arrays start at 0 and not at 1 like activeX and maxscript arrays)

firstTab = axList.tapPages.item[0]

this will store the first tab in the tab controller to in the variable first Tab.

if you need to query the or change the selected node there are now two methods to do this

selectedIndex = axlist.selectedIndex
selectedTab = axlist.selectedTab

the last thing i found out is some simple way of changing the appearance of your tabs.

tabStyle = dotNetClass  "System.Windows.Forms.TabAppearance"

this give you a dot net class from which you can apply 1 of the the following 3 styles

apClass.buttons
apClass.flatButtons
apClass.normal

this is how you apply the flatButtons style to your tab controller.

tabStyle = dotNetClass  "System.Windows.Forms.TabAppearance"
axlist.Appearance = apClass.flatButtons

this is what I’ve run into today, i don’t like how the tab’s are highlighted by default when selected i don’t think it is obvious enough. i will play around and see if a can find some good methods of changing that, i might play around with changing the color of selected nodes or something until then, good luck and good night.

cheers,

Los.

This are some old notes, i had posted on another site regarding activeX to dotNet scripting… might be old news but i figured someone might find it usefull 🙂

So today i began to look into dot net controllers inside of max so that i can brake the studios current dependency on max 8 (activeX controller in max 9 don’t work unless 8 is installed),

and while it seem that the general work flow of the activeX controllers carries over to dotNet, there are allot of thing that are not documented and have become way more complex.

the main thing i noticed is dealing with object fonts, sizes, and styles such as bold italic etc, has become a bit more of a chore. here are some of the things i’ve found out, that i couldn’t find any where on the net.

when dealing with tree view nodes under activeX this is how you would change the text

node.font = "Tahoma"
node.fontsize = 7
node.bold = true

this has become a bit more complex in dotNet. a font is now an object value which is created out of sevral other objects and classes…

“fontfamily” this is the actual windows font to use

“fontStyle” this is the style of the text which can be bold , italic, crossed, etc

size can be controlled by a single integer value

so the first thing is to create both of this objects

fontFam = dotNetObject "system.drawing.fontfamily" "tahoma" --this makes the font object
fontStyle = dotNetClass "system.drawing.fontStyle" --this creates a list from which style can be pulled

next we will put it all together

myFont = dotNetObject "system.drawing.font" fontFam 7 fontStyle.bold
--the node font can now be overwritten by this line
node.nodeFont = myFont

anwyas i hope this helps some of you out there some. i will try and make more of this blog as i keep working with the new dotNet controllers in maxscript.

cheers,

Los.