Thursday 6 October 2011

Mudbox Life Saver Mini App

okay dokey boys and girls time for a nice little life saving app for all you mudbox users.

Now you know the one thing annoys all of us that have used mudbox and has can be a right old
nuisance in production? When the mudbox preferences get corrupted and can cause all manner of crazy errors and bugs to crop up that use up your time, my time, autodesk tech support's time...time better spent in a much more productive way, so when it crops up basically everyone is the loser.

So what casues it?

the preference files can become corrupt from time to time for any one of a shed load of reasons. Wher they do mudbox can have one of about 200 hissy fits throwing what seems like bugs but are actualy due to the preferences being corrupt. Hence the #1 rule if your having a problem with a bug in mudbox is you'll be asked if you have 'deleted the mudbox folder in your documents folder' So that this is then recreated next time mudbox starts up and usually 90% of the time solves theproblem you may be having.

So as I had a couple of mins spare, I've knocked up a very simple EXE that'll work on win 7 and delete the contents of the Mudbox folder in your Documents folder (I've been using a varation on this since the 2009 version and just never got around to sharing it.) Yes you can do ths by hand, and no its not very hard at all to code. (its simply a fact that I don't think anyone bothered to upload it for anyone to use lol.) One good thing is its both 'future proof' and 'past proof' and doesn't matter what pc version your running 2009,2010, 2011 subscription advatage pack, the latest one...whatever...it does not care.


So to remedy this, here ya go,....it comes complete with absolutely no tech support at all (so please no emails if you are having issues) and if you can already set up a batch file instead to do it, go right ahead. This is for those of you who want a quick 1 click fix and who maybe aren't coders, chances are if you are and your a mudbox user, you've probably wrote your own anyway.

Just stick it on your desktop, double click on it when needed and it will come up wiht a promot asking you if your sure (just in case you hit it by accident) , proviign you say 'yes' it will then proceed to delete everything in the "Users\Documents\Mudbox" folder along with the folder itself for the current user. (so please remember to back stuff up if you have other stuff in there if you want to keep it, you shouldn't really be storing models etc there anyway!)

I also have a far more elegant solution that restores your brush prefernces and settings but alas it'd be a nightmare to convert so it'd be useful for
everyone else on the planet except me. Should I ever get time I'll be sure to upload it.