Customizing Toolbar Icons in 3DS Max

Customizing toolbars can be a quick and easy way to improve efficiency in your rendering workflow. It’s important, however, to be mindful of the reduction in viewport screen-real-estate. There are various useful modifiers like ‘TurboSmooth’, ‘Symmetry’, ‘Shell’ and ‘Sweep’ that don’t have icons assigned to them. These modifiers will show up in your customized toolbars as text buttons rather than icon buttons. The text is larger than the default icon size and therefore increases the size of the toolbar and subsequently reduces viewport screen-real-estate. You can assign default icons to them by right clicking on the offending text button in the toolbar and selecting ‘Edit Button Appearance’.

However, if you’d like to assign more intuitive icons to them first create your icon image in a program like Photoshop and save two copies of it, the first as a 24x24pixel bitmap file and the second as a 16x16pixel bitmap file. Using the TurboSmooth modifier as an example name them ‘TurboSmooth_Modifier_24i.bmp’ and ‘TurboSmooth_Modifier_16i.bmp’ respectively. You’ll then need to create a black and white ‘alpha’ copy of both of these. Where the white portion of the alpha image corresponds to what you want to be shown in your icon and the black portion of the alpha image makes the corresponding portion of your icon transparent. Name these alphas ‘TurboSmooth_Modifier_24a.bmp’ and ‘TurboSmooth_Modifier_16a.bmp’. Save the four image files in the following folder:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max Design 2012\UI\Icons

Next you’ll need to modify the MaxScript that controls the icon images in toolbars in Max. As always whenever modifying MaxScript save out a backup copy of the original file so that you can revert back to it if need be. Right click on the modifier text button in the toolbar and select ‘Edit Macro Script’. This will take you directly to the portion of script that controls the modifier that you right-clicked on. For 3DS Max Design on 64bit Windows 7 the Macro_Modifiers.mcr file can be found in:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max Design 2012\UI\MacroScripts\Macro_Modifiers.mcr

Under the line:
ButtonText:~TURBOSMOOTHMOD_BUTTONTEXT~

Add the following:
Icon:#("TurboSmooth_Modifier",1)

Save the file, close and re-open Max. Your custom icon button should appear in place of the text button in your toolbar. If you have trouble saving the Macro_Modifiers.mcr file you might need to adjust the security settings found in the file properties.


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