The control panel is a place where you can set personal preferences specific to your workflow. It is broken up into four main sections Art, Animation, Misc, and Debug Info.
With this enabled, when the export button is pressed in the cryExport utility rollout, cryTools will loop through all objects that are in the current export list and check all of their materials and submaterials. cryTools will generate a warning if it finds any non 'Crytek' materials or any object with no defined material.
Biped forearm twist bones are parented to the upper arm for some weird reason. They still work if you reparent them to the lower arm, but on load they are always reparented to the upper arm. With this enabled, the twist bones will be re-parented to the lower arm on character export. This way they do not receive weird double transforms ingame.
The 'animation rigs' have been merged into the main character Max file, because any time the main character was updated, then the animation rig would need to be updated. Now, animate the actual character Max file. Because of this, there are guns parented to the arms that you can cycle through from within the Animation Tools. It is important that these guns not export in the hierarchy. With this option checked, the weapon objects will be exported, as skeletal nodes.
With this enabled, cryTools will auto-update pose collections when you load a file. This is useful when an animation team has a pose collection file somewhere on the network or in P4. You can also click 'Get Latest P4' to manually sync to the latest pose collections from the control panel without restarting.
In addition to the above, each animator can have their pose collections updated from a P4 location every time he opens a maxfile.
This is for advanced users. It disabled all warnings for shader problems, hierarchy issues; everything. You really shouldn't enable this unless working on some test items and getting annoyed with export warnings.
You can disable the splash screen here. It is a good idea to leave the splash screen up as it has some information like your local build/latest build and the version number, it is also up only during the time it takes to load/initialize the tools. The cryTools splash screen can be closed immediately by clicking anywhere on the screen, you can also click menu items and things while it is up.
If you click 'dump callbacks', all the callbacks cryTools has registered will be echoed to the Maxscript Listener. If you click 'remove callbacks' nothing will happen, you have to right click it to remove all callbacks cryTools has set. To reload the callbacks, you must restart max, click 'Check/Install updates from your latest build' in updateTools, or open the tools that registered the callback (like riggingTools or animationTools)
Here you can check for problems.
Following is a list and description of the variables:
LATEST BUILD ON SERVER: This is the filename of the latest build on the server.