August 2010
20 posts
2 tags
Don't send them a turntable - send a model
One of the lesser-known features of OS X 10.6 is the native COLLADA dae file support. You can open a model in Quicklook within the Finder or in Preview.app, the image and PDF previewing app in OS X. If you have a client that’s running OS X 10.6 or higher, they can look at the models, fully lit and textured, without needing a 3D program. It’s like having Acrobat for 3D files:
Just...
5 tags
Making lazy 3D mattes with Photoshop
Update: I’ve noticed a bug with the textures that are output from PS that limits the usability of the files: the resolution isn’t user-changeable so it can output textures that are very low res and you can’t do much about it. The workaround is to open the output images, scale them and then copy, paste and distort the area from the source image. I’m going put in a request...
6 tags
Speed retouching - Filter painting in Photoshop
I’ve been doing retouching for about 16 years now and I’ve fixed a lot of photos. But dust and scratches was one of the things that took me a few years to find the best method of working quickly to fix. The solution I found was to do an aggressive dust and scratches on a copy of your dusty scan layer and then mask it out completely, then painting back the cleaned layer only in the...
2 tags
CrazyBump for Mac
The interactive multi-map generator CrazyBump went into alpha testing this week for OS X. It’s a great program for creating displacement/normal/spec/AO maps:
You can grab it here. Join the forum to provide testing feedback:
http://crazybump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=838
3 tags
Photoshop CS5 edge masking and colour keying
If you missed my review of Photoshop CS5, then you might not know about the new edge masking features in CS5. They are really fast, and really easy to use for complicated masks like hair and fur. Just make a selection, click the Refine Edge button when you have a selection tool active and tweak the Smart Radius value until your mask looks right:
Quickly clean up your mask bleed from any...
3 tags
Ptex in V-Ray for Maya 2.0 (with updated 3D-Coat...
So a sweet little thing snuck into the V-Ray for Maya nightlies recently: Ptex support. For people who don’t know what Ptex is, check out my SIGGRAPH 2010 Ptex brief on Ars Technica or read the official overview. In short, Ptex is a replacement for UVs and it is going to make our 3D lives a lot easier since we’ll no longer be forced to deal with manual UV assignment and optimizing UV...
2 tags
Best price I could find for ZBrush 4
I just got another seat of ZBrush 4 for $510 US:
http://www.novedge.com/products/3181
That’s $40 cheaper than the Pixologic promo price. Crappy looking site but great deal and everything activated fine.
4 tags
Photoshop tip: use a harsh curve edit to...
In my three-part series Editing Your Images Without the Mystery for Ars Technica from 2005, I posted a tip that I still use all the time. I was using it again today and thought that I’d repost here for people who never read the series (there are at least three people on the internet who haven’t). Whenever you have a hard time seeing things with in low-contrast areas, make a really...
6 tags
Shadow matte settings for V-Ray for Maya
If you’re like me, you probably try things about ten different ways before reading the manual. It’s a really bad habit and when I saw that episode of The Simpsons where Homer makes art accidentally by not reading the BBQ assembly manual, I could relate:
So I’m posting this as both a help for others (there’s not a lot of V-Ray for Maya coverage) and as a reminder to...
Anonymous asked: Good afternoon, I'm having some troubles with the GoP mel, i already have it at the shelf and have tried to use it several times with different meshes but i cant make it work, the mel command keeps showing this error // Error: Invalid file type specified: OBJexport, i have already set my PS CS5 and tested it with testfile.obj and it opens it by default with the CS5. I hope you can point me in...
2 tags
Force Nuke to use all cores for Hyper-Threaded...
Nuke doesn’t use all cores in my hyper-threaded Nehalem Xeon Mac Pro 2009 by default, so I have to use a TCL command to force it to use all cores. If you want to check how many cores Nuke is using at any time, hit x and enter this TCL command:
set threads
By default, this is what’s shown on my max 16-thread Mac Pro:
If you have hit the x key and enter:
set threads 16
It will...
5 tags
Put Mac to sleep after command line render
One of the really great things about OS X’s command line is that it goes beyond just a standard *NIX CL to add support for things like AppleScript. This lets you issue commands to the OS that would otherwise be difficult to do just with the shell and common utilities. I often use this AppleScript command after a render command to put my machine to sleep after it’s done:
osascript -e...
3 tags
Job collection script for Nuke
I’m feeling pretty happy with my basic shell scripting skills. I just managed to make a script that reads Nuke files and collects all the used files to a folder for archiving/transport. All OBJ ReadGeo nodes and %04d numerical input stuff collect as well.
Here’s the script to download:
Nuke Collect Shell Script
Usage: drag the script into the Terminal window (or copy it to a bin...
1 tag
Don't Cross the Streams!
I just bought a Canon EOS 7D (weeee) and I’ve been archiving my HV20 camcorder footage to Blu-ray since I sold the camera. Adobe Encore CS5 is great for this but sometimes chokes on the building process. I figured out that it was mostly mixed transcode settings but then there was the building of H.264 streams that went haywire:
Shortly after:
NOOOOOOOOOOoooooo!
Now that you’ve...
12 tags
Nuke, Light Passes and 3D - Dynamic Composites
I art direct magazines and often make little 3D-rendered images for the content. Some are 3D illustrations and some are simply faked photos. This is good for those times when hiring a product photographer is overkill. Some magazines have little white rooms for shooting stuff like this but I don’t and I find the quality is lacking if you don’t have good studio lighting equipment. Enter...
5 tags
Open a File In An Instanced Program on OS X
One of the misconceptions about OS X is that it can’t run the same application more with than one instance. The way around this is to open the Terminal and write “open -n /Applications/yourapp.app” and it will launch a new instance of the app, even if it’s open. I made an Automator OS X Service to open selected video files in an instance of VLC and another for Maya 2009:
...
