December 2010
24 posts
4 tags
V-Ray Tuner 2 teaser
I thought I’d show off a little thing I’m doing with the next version of V-Ray Tuner. I wrote a while back about rendering separate light passes with floating point EXR renders to get all the flexibility of Maxwell’s Multilight with V-Ray, and I’ve developed something that’s a lot more friendly than using render layers. Select your lights, hit “Render per...
6 tags
Both GoP and V-Ray Tuner updated
GoP update now works with object names so it’s easier to use with named renders like my baked V-Ray Tuner output passes:
The V-Ray Tuner is small but significant. I made a batch bake section and a “DaveBake420” command that takes all your selected objects and renders out baked textures for all active render elements. It even names the rendered image according to the object...
3 tags
Open a folder for the active Maya scene in The...
Just made this so I thought I’d post it. Opens your open scene’s rendered images folder in the OS X Finder (sorry, I don’t know how to do these commands in Windows or Linux, so it’s Mac only.
$filelocation = `file -q -sn`;
system (("echo ") + $filelocation + (" | xargs dirname | sed 's_.*_&/../images_' | xargs open"));
Obviously, that can be converted to anything...
4 tags
Melt an object with ZBrush and Maya
Someone on the CGSociety forum asked how to do this, so I thought I’d post the best way to accomplish a melting effect, by using blend shapes in Maya. Import the before and after state from your sculpting app, create a blend shape and animate:
Super easy. Obviously you’d need to detail things a little better than that and it gets trickier once you get into really making it...
3 tags
Automatically turn off the grid when opening the...
I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner since I do it every time I open the UV Editor in Maya, but here’s a simple way to do it automatically, by changing your UV Editor shelf command or marking menu script to this:
TextureViewWindow;
textureWindow -e -toggle 0 polyTexturePlacementPanel1; txtWndUpdateEditor("polyTexturePlacementPanel1", "textureWindow", "null", 101);
From...
3 tags
Save time in Maya by just using the initial...
I have a scene where all the objects are all using the same electron microscope V-Ray material, so I decided to just use this workaround to save having to connect the shader to every new object. You can do the same thing with the blinn materials that ZBrush GoZ makes when importing into Maya. That way, you can keep the displacement map portion of the shading group and one master template for the...
3 tags
Updated all videos for HTML5 embeds and a rant...
I used a variation of my Automator posted yesterday to update all my Tumblr posts with HTML5-compatible iframe embeds for all Vimeo videos. Thanks to this Service in Safari, it took 10 minutes to update about 30 video posts:
Awesome. If you want the Service for yourself, grab it here. Keep in mind the Service only works with Safari, since it uses standard Cocoa text fields.
So why is that...
4 tags
Encapsulator Service for OS X 10.6 and up
Since I discovered how to pass text through UNIX commands with Automator, I’ve been on a kick making workflow speed-ups. The latest is an OS X Service workflow for encapsulating selected text with whatever you specify in the Automator command. The obvious benefit is for coding HTML (within any Cocoa text editor, like TextEdit, Safari, TextMate, BBEdit, etc):
Download the service here...
7 tags
Trick GoZ with a symlink in OS X
Symlinks are a great way to get around programs putting stuff where you don’t them to. GoZ is one of those. It just drops stuff into a static folder and doesn’t care what your current project is, so I use a symlink (like an old Mac alias but they work deeper in the filesystem):
Move onto your next project and make a new symlink. Grab the OS X Service here (place in...
3 tags
Grab my MEL script to link displacement to object...
2010-12-15: Updated so it creates a unique expression for multiple objects. Same link.
I finally got around to finishing a MEL script that a lot of people will probably want. It creates an expression to to link your object scale to your displacement map. Grab it here, put in your Maya script folder, restart Maya (or type “rehash” into the MEL command line), select the object that has...
3 tags
MEL coders - do math within Cocoa apps with Kava...
OS X applications that use Cocoa framework text boxes get special benefits. The biggest benefit is access to text services and the great software that can expand on the functionality of existing programs via these services. I recently downloaded the shareware KavaServices and it has a lot of nice translation features but the coolest one is the text calculator that lets me do math by selecting...
5 tags
Blend shapes as a workaround for GoZ and vertex...
If you need to preserve vertex normals after sending meshes to ZBrush and back to Maya, check out my Transfer Attributes and blend shapes workflow:
5 tags
Updated my FBX and SIPS workflows for multiple...
My Unix skills are not brilliant so it took me a while to figure out how to make my OS X Automator workflows work for multiple files. The answer was really simple – process the input as standard input and do the command on a per-line basis:
The result:
Grab the updated files from the links below:
sips image conversion workflow service FBX Converter workflow service
Installation is the...
5 tags
Use UNIX key shortcuts in Maya Script Editor
TIP: you can use control-a and control-e to go to the beginning and ending of lines in Maya’s Script Editor. This is borrowed from the typical UNIX shell behaviour. You can also use control-d for forward delete but that seems to be the extent of Maya’s UNIX style key bindings. For other text fields, use option-arrow to skip to beginning/end points of text fields.
2 tags
Toggle pick chooser in Maya
Sometimes you have a bunch of overlapping models that are difficult to grab so you want the pick chooser but it’s rare that you want to leave it on. Add this command to your shelf and click it when you want to toggle it on or off:
int $pickChoo = (!`selectPref -q -popupMenuSelection`);
selectPref -popupMenuSelection $pickChoo;
4 tags
Add this line to OBJ export scripts so it never...
For whatever reason, the OBJ loader in Maya often fails to autoload, so some MEL-based plug-ins like Headus UV Layout try to export and fail. If you want to avoid this, just add this line to the beginning of these MEL scripts:
if (!(`pluginInfo -q -l objExport`))
{ loadPlugin objExport; }
It will load the OBJ plug-in automatically before loading the procedures for the script itself....
4 tags
Made a Handbrake CLI workflow to process iPhone 4...
I wanted a fast way to deal with footage captured on my iPhone 4 and Final Cut ain’t it, so I made an OS X 10.6 Service to process the movie files with Handbrake’s CLI app. Grab it here if you want it. You’ll need to install the HandBrakeCLI command line application to /usr/local/bin/ for it to work. The Service (put it in ~/Library/Services/) writes a queue file to your desktop,...
6 tags
Maya 2011 Mac edition font fixes. Make Maya UI...
Maya 2011 was a massive overhaul. Migrating the millions of lines of code to Qt wasn’t easy and the Maya team deserves recognition for a successful migration to a unified platform. Mac users are already seeing the benefits with formerly Windows-only features like V-Ray’s Frame Buffer being ported to Qt and, consequently, all platforms that Maya 2011+ runs on. It’s going to be...
1 tag
Boole plug-in for Maya test
So I got in on the the ticket01 Boole plug-in beta test for Maya and this thing is great. Everyone knows how absolutely awful Maya’s Booleans are, and we’ve all been forced to find workarounds, even for seemingly simple mesh combinations. Until now. My first tests with Boole are showing it to be very hard to break:
I have a model that was literally waiting for this beta test...
3 tags
Ambient occlusion as a poor man's light ground...
I was walking my dog Roscoe yesterday and there was that sort of wimpy light snow that’s more ground than flakes all around. The interesting part was how, with no real direction to the wind, it collected in a way that looked like ambient occlusion in reverse (white instead of black). So I did a quick test in Maya with a dome light and V-Ray dirt texture, baked it out, then inverted the...
4 tags
Added a lot of stuff to my Facer MEL script
I’ve been steadily adding things to my quick-access modelling palette I called “Facer.” It’s not magical but it has a lot of handy subscripts and access to hidden stuff like Maya’s pop-up normal length slider, which I only recently discovered myself. For people annoyed by Maya’s stuck component selection problem, it has a fix that cycles selections and removes...
4 tags
Topological masking in ZBrush 4
ZBrush is one of those programs that has so many tools that it’s easy to lose some of the better ones in all that stuff. ZBrush 4’s topological auto-masking is one of those. Often you’ll sculpt something and close objects on the other side get distorted as well. You used to have to hide these objects but toggling topological masking is the way to avoid problems like this:
...
2 tags
Use ZBrush's Crumple, Slash and Move brushes for a...
I’m working on a scene now that involves a hospital bed and I need a pillow that looks slept on. I already have a pillow model that was very hard-looking, so it only took a couple minutes in ZBrush to make it look slept in, since ZBrush has so many good tools for this type of effect:
Since it can be tricky to see the subtle crumpled edges while you work, it’s a good idea to use a...
