May 2013
3 posts
5 tags
Why You Don't Want to Run a Mac in Boot Camp As...
Apple makes nice hardware and some people are tempted to run Mac machines in Windows via Boot Camp as their main workstation, thinking they are getting the familiarity of Windows with the Apple hardware. Apple’s Boot Camp drivers support the GPU, motherboard chipset, audio, etc. in your machine but there is one crucial difference that I just discovered while writing an article on ExFAT for...
4 tags
Note About Houdini Installs on OS X with Custom...
I use Python 3.3 for my multithreaded Automator actions in OS X but I just realized that this prevents Houdini from installing properly if you’ve overwritten /usr/bin/python with anything other than Python 2.7. If you have a custom Python version installed, just copy the 2.7 binary back over /usr/bin/python, and then Houdini will install correctly.
5 tags
Skip a Trip to Photoshop: Use the V-Ray Color...
V-Ray for Maya has some pretty handy (but slightly hidden) tools that can be added from the Create From V-Ray Plug-in menu and one of the best is the Color Correction node. It’s basically a grading dialog for textures and can do quite a bit, and it can save you trips to Photoshop to just do slight tweaks to hue, contrast, etc.:
The only thing to keep in mind is that the brightness is a...
April 2013
5 posts
6 tags
Small Maintenance Update to V-Ray Tuner for Maya...
V-Ray Tuner 3.4.1 posted for download. There’s not too much new here but there’s an important fix for the Optimize button script for Maya 2014. Maya 2014 has a bug that returns the wrong number for RAM amount for “memory -phy” so, if you’re running 2014, the script asks you to enter your memory amount in GB. Otherwise, the only other new addition is that I’ve...
hiimmaxfischer asked: Just came across the post you made about using the illustrator blend tool to make sand dunes in zBrush, but can't seem to find the post your are referencing in the beginning. The one about the Illustrator blend tool. If it is still posted, would you mind sending me the link? I really like the look of this technique. Thank you.
5 tags
A Guide to Creating a V-Ray Linux Render Slave
Recently, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about setting up a Linux-based V-Ray render box and most of those queries are coming from Mac users who are in need of more oomph but don’t want to shell out for the very dated 2010 Mac Pros. So slavery is all the rage as people are discovering the merits of cheap additional labour. But Linux is the black diamond course of computing, so here is...
3 tags
Pose Deformer Maya 2014 Mac build
Michael Comet’s Pose Deformer Mac Maya 2014 build can be downloaded here. I am using the latest updated source that David Johnson has tweaked to fix an issue with compiles on 2014. The Windows version is available on his djx blog here. I’m bundling the Python version of the Pose Reader plug-in but it seems to have an issue where it complains about a missing connection but everything...
2 tags
Maya 2014 Upgrade: A Brief Look at NEX Integration...
Maya 2014 is out on subscription so I thought I’d post a few thoughts for those on the fence about the update. I was a beta tester for 2014 so I have a good understanding of what’s been added to the release and it’s a solid upgrade in my opinion. Aside from the beefy scene assembly tools, grease pencil, sweet volume-centred joint tool, Node Editor upgrades, there is plenty new to...
March 2013
5 posts
kazidamui asked: Hey Dave, I'm digging through your posts and the all the Maya script references I can find about the dockControl command in order to build a little toggle hotkey script that would switch between docked windows... but I can't find a command to query the active one. Any suggestion? Thx
6 tags
V-Ray Tuner 3.4 Update Releasededed
This is not a huge update to V-Ray Tuner but it brings a few fixes and features that affect various things. Here’s 3.4 changelog:
Composite pre-bake diffuse colour with V-Ray Dirt RE:
Changed DaveBake420 10% value to be 512x512, instead of 409.6x409.6 (10% of 4096).
Attach Cam button now prompts you to add and enable physical cam attributes if you don’t have them already on...
4 tags
A Script for Photoshop to Rename the Layer With...
Update: now with JavaScript version for Windows/OS X.
I do a lot of composites of similar images or render passes, so I like to have the document name as the layer name so it’s clear which document was used for the layer. I don’t know much about scripting Photoshop but I managed to piece together a very basic AppleScript to do exactly that, so grab it here if you want to:
Here is a...
4 tags
Mixing Displacement Maps in Any Maya Renderer
Someone on CGSociety asked how to mix displacement maps in Maya, so I figured I’d give him some tips and make a blog post out of it, since I’ve seen this asked a few times in the past. This process works for all renderers since it uses Maya’s utilities, nothing specific to V-Ray or mental ray. Instead of doing it with blend materials or something like that, it’s all done by...
5 tags
Maya for OS X Window Layering Tweak
I just got word of this tip that lets you alter the way that windows float in Maya for OS X. By default, floating palettes sit on top of the main window in Maya and this can be either helpful or annoying, depending on your preference. Luckily, you can change this behaviour to let the main window cover palettes by adding this line to your Maya.env file...
February 2013
8 posts
4 tags
iCollide – Another Amazing (and free) Maya Plug-in
Yesterday, I plugged (nyuk) iDeform, Ingo Clemens’ free Maya plug-in for real-time displacement previewing. If you look around Ingo’s blog, you’ll find a bunch of other great scripts and plug-ins and iCollide definitely warrants a mention. It’s basically L3Deformer’s collision deformer for free:
4 tags
Some Tips on Efficiently Building and Texturing...
So, I’m relatively new to the world of organic world building. I’m mostly experienced in illustration in the product-visualization vein but I’m getting into more fully-fleshed scenery and I’ve been investigating some options like Vue, Terragen, etc. But, I like to keep things in Maya if possible, so I’m going to post some helpful tips and things I’ve learned...
4 tags
While I'm Making More Hotkeys – Here's a...
I got tired of opening the Create Render Node dialog from menus, since I use it so much, so I made another hotkey script. This will bind a material if you have an object selected (like the right-click Create Material selection) or it will just create a new node if nothing is selected, which is good for shader building in the Node Editor or Hypergraph:
global proc createNoderr()
{
if...
4 tags
Updated Hotkey Script for Material Selection à la...
So, a while ago I posted a handy hotkey script to bring up the Attribute Editor for the selected object’s material but it didn’t work properly with face-level component selections, if there were multiple materials on the mesh (this is also a problem for showShadingGroupAttrEditor). You can see the difference between the old script and the new one here (with my Venetian Snares playing...
7 tags
V-Ray Tuner 3.3 Gets the Hot Feature Injection
I am pretty happy with the latest V-Ray Tuner 3.3 update. It adds a number of features that I now use constantly and I think they’ll be pretty popular. Here’s a break down of what’s new in 3.3:
Optimize setting now prompts you for core count when distributed rendering is on. Use the max threads of any of your machines that are active in the render. If you have a local machine...
5 tags
Regarding Poor Windows mental ray Performance
I got a PM on CGSociety about mental ray performance on Windows and I thought I’d post it here since it’s obviously of interest to Maya users. Here it is:
I found this thread of yours [talking about mental ray in Windows performance vs. Mac OS X and Linux]:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-1058847.html
I’m wondering if you were able to do anything to bring Win...
6 tags
A Note About Script Compatibility with Maya...
After reading a post on CGTalk, I just realized that a lot of people think that the version compatibility listed with scripts on Creative Crash – where 95% of our Maya scripts are probably downloaded from – are accurate. They aren’t. A person will check for Maya 2013 compatibility, see it’s not enabled, so they don’t download the script because they think it’s broken by the...
More Free Crap! OBJ Sequence Exporter Posted for...
I recently built an OBJ sequence exporter for someone who needed it for After Effects, which doesn’t yet have Alembic support, so I’m posting it for y’allseses to grab if you need it too. There’s no good reason to use OBJ sequences over Alembic, which is about 12,904,731 times better for animation export, but there are still apps like AE that don’t know what the...
January 2013
7 posts
3 tags
New Free Maya Script: Automatic Project Path...
After getting tired of manually setting project paths for files that were already open, I made a simple script that does exactly that and then prompts you to reopen the file so assets from relative paths load correctly:
The script assumes that you are using the standard project/scenes format, with the currently open file in the /scenes/ folder. There are some scripts out there can monitor your...
3 tags
Gamma Correct: The Maya "Constant" Texture You...
Frequently, when you work in Maya, you want to create a flat colour to mix with a utility like a blendColor or Multiply/Divide. Now that I use the Node Editor for all my shader networking needs, I want to type “Constant,” Nuke style and many Maya users are probably wondering why Maya doesn’t have a simple constant colour swatch. Well, it does. For anyone accustomed to using a...
6 tags
GoP 2.0 Adds Camera Support to Scenes Sent to...
So I’ve updated GoP with some handy changes which bring it up to version 2.0 (download link). If you don’t know GoP, it’s a script that lets you send selected objects in Maya to Photoshop for texturing. The original version used the OBJ format as a go-between but 2.0 now uses .dae COLLADA format, which has some nice advantages – most notably, camera support:
As you tell,...
4 tags
8 tags
Amazing Python Script for Nuke That Creates a 3D...
If you do compositing in Nuke, you know it can be annoying to get camera data in and out of a 3D package like Maya or Max. Imported camera data quickly gets outdated when new frames are rendered, which forces you to jump back and forth between your 3D app and Nuke. Fortunately, yesterday I discovered a script for Nuke that makes it dead simple to generate camera data from the camera metadata...
7 tags
A Guide to Optimum Minimum Memory Amounts for...
I’ve worked in a variety of computer graphics fields and RAM has always had a big effect on all of them. My first photo-retouching job had a highly exotic Mac PowerPC 8100 with 144MB of RAM – that memory cost well over $10,000 at the time. While it may sound less crazy to people who worked on old render farms, it was alarming for a desktop computer and I went home to my still-expensive 16MB...
6 tags
Mixing a V-Ray Sun and Sky Environment with HDR...
For a while now, I’ve been mixing V-Ray skies with some HDR environments and was doing it in Nuke because I didn’t realize it was doable in Maya – that is, until Vlado at Chaos Group suggested using a Blend Colors utility. I should have thought of it myself but sometimes you forget just how good V-Ray integration is within Maya, and assume something like that won’t work. But it...
December 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Rendering and Compositing a Dust Pass in Maya
I’m doing a quick render to use as the base for a painting and wanted to add some dust to my scene to cover the rubble and earthquake. It’s all pretty draft quality work but notice how quickly a dust layer comped in Photoshop adds a lot of realism to a pretty sparse scene:
The process is pretty easy: duplicate your render layer with everything in it, create a render layer override...
5 tags
Facer 3.0 Brings the Non-denominational Holiday...
Just kidding – happy Urdu Festivus, one and all. Here is your gift from me: a beefy update to the Facer polygon toolkit. I whittled it myself out of unloved dreidels.
Here’s a rundown of what’s new in 3.0:
Triangulate now works with multiple mesh selections.
Added UV unfolder script. This correctly unfolds selected UVs using the horizontal, then vertical unfold operations. Need...
8 tags
Maya File Preview Batch Processor for OS X
In an older post and in my 101 Autodesk Maya Tips, I talked about how you can send UNIX standard output to Maya via its commandPort and I just made a tool that batch generates previews for files using an open session of Maya. I made something similar in the past but it was slow because it launched a new session of Maya for each file via command line rendering. This is very quick because it just...
7 tags
Maya Crash File Opener Updated for OS X
When Maya crashes, it tries to save out a file to a temp folder that you can recover on relaunch. In my 101 Autodesk Maya Tips I mention how you can get this file to open in Maya without digging through temp folders on Mac/Win/Linux but it seems that, due to what I think is V-Ray’s redirection of standard output, I no longer get the path of the crash file in the system log. So, I’m...
7 tags
V-Ray Tuner 3.2 – Small Maintenance Update for...
I’ve updated V-Ray Tuner with some more robust changes to the handling of materials and textures when using the Gamma Correct Me script. It now works with any type of texture and it no longer gamma corrects a node if it’s parented to a gamma correct already. It’s more foolproof overall and, as always you can do the degamma on textures or the parent V-Ray materials:
Other...
jtr3 asked: Think the new iMac could serve as a stand-alone 3d workstation if I had to make a living off it?
November 2012
7 posts
8 tags
My MakeHuman V-Ray SSS Skin Conversion Templates
So, after some tweaks and playing around, I’ve come up with a good starting set of templates to convert MakeHuman output characters to V-Ray for Maya via Nuke. Download the setup files at the bottom of this page (includes Maya V-Ray scene and source images as well). Currently, the Nuke template that I use for the source skin is set up for the caucasian skin PNG files that come with...
3 tags
MakeHuman – Amazing App for $0
So, I checked out the CGChannel blog yesterday and saw a post about MakeHuman, which I’d never heard of until then. I was pleased to find out that it was free, had an app for all platforms, and that it’s amazing for quickly building rigged characters with a huge amount of variable possibilities. If you’ve ever played a game that let you build a character, you’ll appreciate...
5 tags
V-Ray Tuner 3.1 Adds Basic File Texture Manager...
Updated V-Ray Tuner with some things I think many people will find helpful:
Select objects with selected materials script selects objects, not just faces, for selected material:
Added feature to Material Copy Dropper: if only one object is selected, it will duplicate the material and upstream nodes and apply it to the selected object
Gamma Correct Me now gamma corrects connected subtextures...
2 tags
Fix for Sudden Drag Selection Problem in Maya
Occasionally, for whatever reason, Maya will suddenly enable click dragging for translation tools. I don’t know if there’s an obscure hotkey that activates it but it’s annoying, since it’s not clear what the problem is, so you end up deleting prefs, thinking that it’s a corruption issue. It can be fixed by turning off “Click drag select” in the...
petes-hand asked: Hey Dave, love your blog and the 101 maya tips! I'm a 3D generalist/motion designer currently looking into getting a new rig. I was checking out your workstation review on ars technica and while they look fast they also seem overly expensive. I'm currently looking into the 6-core i7s and maybe a pair of 5xx GeForce cards (as opposed to a quadro). I current work on a mac system but...
bearnakedladies asked: Not really a question - just wanted to express thanks for the VRay RT batch render script! Just what I needed! :)
October 2012
9 posts
3 tags
Script to Convert PaintFX Strokes at Render Time
I’ve been using Paint Effects a lot lately with my viewport 2 experiments and hate having to convert strokes to polygons to get them appear, so I made a script to convert them, render and then delete the polygon conversions, so all you’re left with is a good render and editable strokes:
The save button is there because I have found Maya can crash on large conversions, so...
4 tags
Tile Renderer for Viewport 2 With Film Back Tips...
I’ve been experimenting with viewport 2 as a minimal look renderer and it’s getting pretty clean results but the main issue is that I want these images to be really big, and viewport 2 currently has a 2048 x 2048 res limit for renders (at least on this 1GB VRAM laptop, it does). So I’ve made a little script to tile render with viewport 2 using a film back translation. Not...
2 tags
Unsharp Masking and Ambient Occlusion Before...
Just looking through my Goya book and noticed the ultra-sharp details of this gorgeous still life, Three Slices of Salmon. If you look closely, you can see that he covers it with a darkened glaze that picks up the valleys of the brush strokes, much like an unsharp mask or ambient occlusion effect (click for full size):
I apologize for cropping it but I couldn’t fit it all in my scanner....
2 tags
Remember: Absolute Mode is Your Friend
I’m making a waistband for a model of some tighty whiteys (don’t ask) and, if I was to use the default edge loop and slide edge settings, I wouldn’t be able to make a consistent thickness of band. That’s where absolute settings come in handy:
This isn’t a huge tip but it’s one of those things you might have overlooked and assumed that’s just the way...
7 tags
It's Your Maya Script Birthday! V-Ray Tuner 3.0...
So, after finishing up some jobs and adding some features to these while working on those contracts, I have rolled in some new things to both V-Ray Tuner and Facer. There’s quite a bit that’s added in each and I’ve included some features of one script in the other just because it made sense for things like UVs, which affect both modelling and rendering.
V-Ray Tuner 3.0 new...
3 tags
Icons for Maya to Differentiate Versions
After force quitting the wrong version of Maya because all versions since 2011 have had the same icon, I decided to badge each version with a number to identify them so I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I chose a font that would work even at tiny sizes:
and at typical sizes, they look great:
So, here they are for Mac, Linux and Windows:...
5 tags
Easily Strip Out Plug-in Info from Maya Scenes
If you have a lot of plug-ins installed, you know that they can make it a pain to hand off files to other people. Since I generally sell components of my 3D illustration as stock after I complete them, it’s important to make clean assets for sale. While you can manually strip out plug-in data from Maya ASCII files, this is time consuming and there’s a much easier way to do it. Keep a...
9 tags
HDR Light Studio 4 Review
So I took the plunge and bought the recently-released HDR Light Studio 4. This is the first release that is available for OS X and Linux (my two main 3D platforms) so until now, I was only vaguely aware of this formerly Windows-only app. So, with that said, this may not be the best review for those looking to know if it’s a worthy upgrade from 3.0.
First, I’ll talk about the appeal...
5 tags
Nuke Scene Collector 2.1
I just posted an updated version of Nuke Scene Collector that now supports collection of scripts that use the project directory variable to reference assets:
September 2012
7 posts
6 tags
It Works! Shareless V-Ray Distributed Rendering...
A while ago, I wrote a tip for sharing assets between Mac OS X and Linux, by mimicking paths with symlinks on slave machines. It seems that workflow is no longer needed and, what’s better, you can now use Windows machines as slaves without having to worry about C: drive paths screwing up everything. The latest nightly builds of V-Ray for Maya let you transfer missing assets without worrying...
