November 2010
8 posts
4 tags
Let's talk about CMYK, baby – part 1: line screen...
Now that I’ve covered a lot of 3D stuff, let’s talk about some printing stuff, for those who don’t know too much about print. My background is as a magazine art director, and I’ve dealt with some tricky CMYK scenarios through the years. Today was one of those.
This morning I was awoke at 5 a.m. by a call from a press check. It was from a rep who was concerned about some...
5 tags
Dangerous Indesign "feature" rids you of your...
Last week when we were doing press stuff for Bell, I found out that Indesign does something very dangerous with Pantone colours and placed EPS/AI/PDF images. If you have a Pantone converted to CMYK in Indesign and import a logo or something that has a Pantone in it, it will convert it to CMYK if the name of the Pantone in the file is the same as the one you’ve converted:
You may be...
3 tags
Using GREP in Indesign
Since my last post dealt with regular expressions, I thought I’d mention GREP for those who’ve seen the name in Indesign, but have no idea what it’s for or how it’s used. I come from a non-techie design background on the Mac (my Bachelor’s is in Painting and Drawing), so I was among those people until relatively recently. So here is a tip on how to get started with...
3 tags
Updated Nuke Collector script with relinking!...
I wrote a shell script for OS X and Linux that collects Nuke files and the latest version makes a relinked duplicate of your scene:
nukecollectscript.zip
Sorry, I can’t make a Windows version since this is just passing the Nuke file through a lot of UNIX filters like sed, it’s not a binary.
4 tags
Grab my Maya Crash File opener for OS X 10.6 and...
Update: If you grabbed the very first version posted, you might have a problem with this not working after November. I had forgot to replace an “N” with a wildcard so it would work year-round. The file is updated now to fix it and it’s the same link. At the bottom of the post is a post to talk about what the script does, for people looking to understand the UNIX script inside the...
3 tags
Workaround for Maya 2011 Photoshop settings on Mac
Maya 2011 switched to Qt as a development platform, and Qt tends to lag a bit for Mac-specific features like application bundles or aliases. One of the casualties in Maya 2011 was the ability to set Photoshop as your image editor. It simply can’t be done without typing the path out:
With Mudbox, you can at least dig into the application bundle and set the Mudbox binary as your app. But...
3 tags
V-Ray Tuner 1.7 posted
I updated my V-Ray Tuner MEL script today. It’s now an automatically docked palette in Maya 2011 and above. Pretty slick, if I do say so myself:
I plan on doing this by default for my new scripts. It’s a good way to save space and keep things out of your face. It also shows up in the right click UI elements menu:
I done hacked the Maya interface!
4 tags
Key commands for Maya UI stuff - save tons of time
It’s no secret that Maya 2011’s Qt UI is noticeably slower than previous versions. Palettes are slower to load (the first load is the worst) and marking menus can be sluggish. I’ve always been a fan of using keyboard commands for things I do often so 2011 prompted me to go a step further and make some more, to keep working efficiently. So here is a master list of commands...
