I seem to recall someone mentioning how they disabled or hid the mirror tool for all their artists’ 3ds max UIs, both menu and toolbar, to prevent them from inadvertently using the tool and screwing up exportable assets.
I wonder if anyone here has accomplished this, and how?
I’d like to not mess with their individual CUI files either, if I can help it.
How is the mirroring messing up exports? It can reverse Xforms, so you just need to reset them, but it is possible to do other things in max that cause the same issues.
Mirror tool in max causes negative scale. Artists with us used it because visually it looks the same, but export it to the game or even motionbuilder and the mirrored limbs reverse on themselves. I made a maxscript for checking rigs on export which had a failsafe for negative scale. With us every character has a reference node which is always at [0,0,0] the script would select it and its children and would check that the scale of all of them are == 100 we got around the problem.
Thats the problem we had with mirror anyway. The mirror tool in the bone tool however does not cause negative scale and is fine.
Yeah, we have an export check for negative scale, and we have a script for resetting mesh xforms, but this doesn’t work so hot on skinned meshes or on helper nodes.
We had an issue recently where a level designer mirrored a bunch of custom helper objects, which created some hidden transform data that wasn’t discovered until later.
We could add transform checks for every entity type, but that slows down export, and anyhow I’d rather head it off at the source before they make bad data in the first place. Especially if a reset is going to screw up a rig.
i wrote a tiny script just for the fun of more maxscript learning…
just drop it into “<Scripts>/Startup”-folder (Max9 and up)
it registers a callback which closes the mirror dialogs silently, so you do not have to deal with anybodys cui …
has the potential risk to close dialogs having “Mirror Objects” as windowtitle or a windowtitle starting with “Mirror:”. The latter is necesseary because the mirrordialog changes its title according to the current coordinate space.
Hope that it’s usefull for some of you 
Awesome, thanks for this. I’ll try it out when things aren’t so crazy, and let you know.