Auto Incrementing Save Script for 3ds Max File History
One of my absolute favorite everyday scripts for 3ds Max is Martin Breidt's "Incremental Save". It eliminates a ton of headache when dealing with lots of revisions to Max files over a long period. Instead of your 113th iteration of a 3ds Max file being "Project-Filename-v113.max" the name would still be "Project-Filename.max" and there would be a subfolder called "Project-Filename-bak" with 112 previous versions of your file in it. Essentially you have a never ending history of your project from when you started to now.
Main file listing. These are the active 3ds Max files I'm working on for this project.
I've made a simple change to the script that tidy's things up for us by putting everything in an "archive" subfolder. In our office it's not uncommon to have an ongoing project for several years (a hospital for instance) so this enables us to maintain a history of all changes made to the project and at any time revert to those previous iterations.
Another benefit to this workflow is in the area of XREF's. When we break apart animation scenes we use XREF scenes to separate the data. Using the incremental save script our current 3ds max xref files have consistent names so any file that references them still works.
Drop me a comment below if you'd like my (barely) edited version of the script with the "archive" subfolder modification.
Archive director listing - my (very minor) adjustment to the script to put all the incremental save directories in the archive subfolder.
The file history that incremental save provided