I’m coming from Maya, learning Max, and I’m noticing Groups behave differently.
In Maya groups are essentially transform nodes, and you can have empty groups (very useful for organizing things)
It appears that a Max groups != empty transform nodes (in fact you can’t have an empty group at all)
I found this blog suggesting using dummy objects in Max where group nodes would be used in Maya.
Is this common practice?
Althought I’m not very familiar with the rigging tools in Maya, I have heard the well known and well respected 3ds Max rigger Paul Neale talk briefly about groups in Maya. He created a free MAXScript called “M” Groups which you can get from his website, it’s functions are also well documented there too.
http://www.paulneale.com/scripts/mGroup/mGroup.htm
Hope this helps,
-Harry
Dummys is the common replacement in Max for Maya groups. Despite the similarity in names, they are really that close in function - dummies are essentially ‘empty transforms’ like Maya groups. You might recall that ‘createNode -transform’ in Maya produces an empy group – same idea.
I’m not too familiar with Maya, but you might be looking for the functionality of assemblies? They are groups with a helper class object as the parent.
Search the docs for Assembly, you’ll find a little bit of info. I believe they share a lot of code with the Group system, but they aren’t really used in max as far as I know. You can go to Group>Assembies to poke around at the built in functionality… Its not super useful.
You are probably better of handling and building assemblies with your own scripts.
For a really simple example, throw down a bunch of objects and run this script:
assemblyMgr.Assemble $ name:“MyAssembly” classDesc:dummy
I’ve found these really useful in the past, at a previous studio I built a [brut force] file referencing system using assemblies and a custom helper object plugin.
Avoid groups in Max! They are NOT just transforms- in fact, they have all their own maxscript functions… just use Dummy objects (or some locator/dummy-like object, even a custom one), and reap code that works like it should.
Unfortunately Groups have additional functionality that may be useful for people as they work (like, well, ‘grouping’ objects, parenting them to group them isn’t as effective as it is in Maya). However if your concerns are primarily technical (ie, rigging)- then no, not groups, never.
There may be some newer Max stuff I’m not familiar with (like this ‘assemblies’ stuff above?)
Rather than dummys , I have gravitated to Max’s point helper objects as my Maya group equivalent. This is because point helpers’ visual representation can be set to a variety of objects -box, cross, etc- including nothing at all, making them the same as maya groups .
Good choice. Also, to change the visual size of “dummy’s” you have to actually scale it. Which of course is bad sauce. Points are the best way to go for sure.
Max dummy helpers have a .boxsize parameter that lets you resize them (but not visible in the UI). It’s a point3 value so you can also give them non-cube dimensions without scaling.
Huh, no kidding. I’d still stick with Points. 
I also ended up using points mostly, I have the problem that focusing the camera on it by hitting ‘Z’ moves the camera to 0,0,0 instead of the point.
For dummies it works alright.
Does anyone have a solution for that?
[QUOTE=saschaherfort;20214]I also ended up using points mostly, I have the problem that focusing the camera on it by hitting ‘Z’ moves the camera to 0,0,0 instead of the point.
For dummies it works alright.
Does anyone have a solution for that?[/QUOTE]
a 3DS Max point will spawn at 0,0,0 unless you specify otherwise, so maybe you really are zooming in on the point?