Hi guys,
I took quite many useful tricks and tips from this site and got help from you when I need that. So now I want to share with you the feature I found very useful in my workflow.
It's about mouse buttons functionality in 3DS Max. I work in this program many years and always had a question – why I can use only three mouse buttons for Max's commands? Of course it's possible to use other buttons as normal Windows functions, like undo and redo for example, but I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts for those commands.
And not long time ago I found solution for my wish to use all mouse buttons in Max. This is small program X-Mouse Button Control. It is free of charge program which allows you to override functions of mouse buttons for all or for some of the programs you have on your computer. In my case I use possibility to simulate keys of keyboard in 3DS Max. What does it mean? - It means that when I press 4th button of my mouse 3DS Max sees it as key “\” from keyboard. And for that key I assigned shortcut for Move Transform Type-In dialog. Now when I press 4th button Transform Type-in dialog appears. The same you can do with 5th mouse button if you have it on you mouse and assign another Max's command to it.
BTW about Transform Type-In dialog. I work with architectural visualisation and almost all the time need to move or rotate objects to a certain number of units. And having two quite big screens it always irritated me to move mouse from fares corner of the screen to Transform Type-In dialog in the bottom of the screen to type a numbers there, another possibility is to use build in Transform Type-In dialog, but it appears in a place where you moved it last time and anyway I had to move mouse there. Searching the ways to make Transform Type-In dialog more convenient to use few years ago I asked Rotem (creator of VFB+) - is it possible to write a script which make Transform Type-In dialog appear in a place where I have mouse pointer at the moment. He kindly agreed to write this script and sins that time I use it always. First I activate it with shortcut from keyboard and now I use 4th button of my mouse for this.
Combination of Rotem's Transform Type-In dialog and X-Mouse Button Control is very good for me especially when I model some buildings with certain highs of the floors, distances between windows, etc.
Hope you guys find this information useful for your workflow.
Here are the links to Rotem's mmTransformTypeIn script
http://www.monotoneminimal.com/free-toolsand to X-Mouse Button Control program
http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm
