My animators have requested some simple scripts that make use of the animation preview feature (mainly a “packed up” version that uses some rational default options and doesn’t require clicking through a dialog every time).

Searching maxscript help, I can’t seem to find any way to interact with the preview tool other than launching the dialog.

The help does offer one example using gw.getViewportDib to build a cache of framegrabs which are then loaded into ramplayer… but this is slower and doesn’t give the animator the freedom to pick their own viewer. I suppose I could get some variant of this idea to work with a command line video converter… but that’d be really more trouble than it’s worth to avoid a single dialog.

Anyone know if there are any better handles I can use to wrangle this feature?

Thanks for the lead. I haven’t done anything with the max SDK yet but I do have some basic familiarity with C++ and C#, so perhaps a time will come when I’ll take you up on the offer =)