Zookeeper provides some powerful mechanisms for searching 3d Studio Max using text entry. There are two main types of searches- view search and object search. View search looks for objects inside the currently searched view (or inside all currently open views). Object search is used when creating new objects. It looks for 3d Studio Max types and plugins that match the requested text. All searches look at object names and their description to find potential results.
The search text can be used in different ways. By default regular expressions are used for matching your text to the results.
There is a search box available in the menu section of each view. This allows you to enter text and will update the view in real-time to update your search results. The icon to the left of the search box specifies the search behaviour. You can either filter the view based on your text or you can select objects in it.
Filtering Items: If you choose the search filter behaviour any items inside the view not matching your search text will be either subdued (by transparency) or removed completely from the view. You can get these items back by clearing the search text.
Selecting Items: If you choose the search select behaviour any items inside the view matching your search text will be selected. For example, in an object or layer view you can select scene nodes just by typing in part of their name. This becomes useful when you need to alter properties of multiple objects sharing a similar name. You can select them and then change their properties all at once.
In all views if you right click you will get a context menu that includes a search box. This search box is used for looking for new objects to create by their name. For example, if you type 'Standard' you can then select to create a new Standard Material based on the gived results. This search looks through the whole 3dsmax to find objects which are possible to add to the view. It can either create a new instance of those objects or bring existing instance from another view or the scene.
Often times the contents of the search will be limited to certain object types. For example, if you drag out a texture slot in schematic view you will only be able to search through available textures. This greatly simplifies workflow and speeds up the search process.
Regular expressions are a powerful way of specifying your search queries. You can match any object name by either providing its full version, part of it, or a pattern that appears inside of it. For example, take three objects present in a view: Sphere01, Sphere02, and Teapot01.
Searching for "sphere" will select first and second objects. Searching for "01" will select First and third objects. However, searching for "[a-z]+[0-9]+" will select all objects. [a-z]+ specifies that first part of the name must be literal characters. [0-9]+ says that second part must be one or more digits. As such, any object starting with a name and ending with a number will be matched. Something like SphereOne, however, will be ignored.
