Missing parts of AlembicExport documentation

[patrick.hearn]

I've just discovered this incredibly important part of AlembicExport in MaxScript which I haven't been able to find anywhere. The Autodesk documentation is completely useless on this topic.

Alembic_Export Docs:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2017/ENU/?guid=__files_GUID_5994F8B6_E408_4970_B9F6_3DD3B85A8CF...

This only lists CoordinateSystem and ArchiveType as possible properties for Alembic_Export. I was tearing my hair out trying to find anything telling me how to programatically set things like the frame range! 

I discovered that there's a file AlembicExport.ini which contains the last used settings for the plugin. In here you can find all the property names. Here they are:

CoordinateSystem (#Maya, #Max)
ArchiveType (#Ogawa, #HDF5)
ParticleAsMesh (bool)
CacheTimeRange (#currentFrame, #timeSlider, #StartEnd)
StepFrameTime (float)
StartFrameTime (int)
EndFrameTime (int)
ShapeName (bool)

Then using these options in my search I was able to find this documentation page:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/search-result/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/MAXScript-Help/files/...

Which does list the correct options. This hadn't come up in any of my previous search. Seriously, sort the documentation out Autodesk, that was a huge waste of time.

I hope someone else finds this useful!

[drew_avis]

Hi there, I'm sorry you found this frustrating, and searching the help is not always a great experience.  We maintain several releases of help online to support users with older versions of Max, and sometimes the older version of a topic will float to the top of search results.  In this case, we added more detail to the topic in the 2018 release.  One way to deal with this is to always add the release number to your search string, so for example, using "Alembic_Export maxscript 2018" will get the right topic at the top of the results.

Regards,

Drew

[patrick.hearn]

I'll certainly do that in the future. However, these properties are available in 2017 (which is the version I'm currently using) yet not listed in the documentation for that version.