Documentation

Installation

What is it?

RANCHecker is a 3ds Max plugin developed by Ranch Computing that prepares your project before uploading it to the RANCH.

What is it good for?

RANCHecker does all the dirty work for you: it gathers all the textures used by your scene, includes the GI maps if used, verify that you have correctly set up the rendering parameters, change file paths if necessary and finally compiles your projects in a .VU3 archive file, ready to upload to the RANCH.

How to use it?

With the plugin launched and a scene loaded in 3ds Max, click on the Prepare Project button to prepare the project for the RANCH then click on the Upload Project to RANCH button to render it on the RANCH. That’s all!

Installation

To install RANCHecker, follow these steps:

  1. Download RANCHecker for 3ds Max and unzip it on your hard disk.
  2. In 3ds Max, go to the ‘Scripting/MAXScript’ menu, click ‘Run Script’ and browse to select the MZP file. Or, ‘Drag and Drop’ the MZP file directly to the 3ds Max viewport (make sure you have selected the MZP file and not the ZIP file).

RANCHecker is accessible via the ‘Rendering’ menu:

You can also create a button in the 3ds Max toolbar as a way to launch RANCHecker quickly. To do this you have to:

  1. Go to Customize→Customize User Interface
  2. Go to the Toolbar tab, Category: ‘RANCHecker’,
  3. Drag the ‘RANCHecker’ name to the toolbar.