January 2011
9 posts
Sync light scale script for V-Ray Tuner 2 for Maya
Just a handy script that’s part of my V-Ray Tuner version 2.0 that’s in the works. This lets you scale lights freely in the viewport and just hit the sync button to have the value set in the RectLightShape’s U and V size, which is the proper way to scale lights with V-Ray for Maya.
I’m just working out some kinks with the per-light render script and I hope to have V-Ray...
5 tags
Accounting for Bleed When Rendering for Print
I do most of my 3D work for stills and print in magazines so I need to often account for the bleed and trim factors. For those unfamiliar with these print terms, a bleed is the area outside the page margins that are cropped out when printing (this crop is the trim dimension). When you do illustration that going to go to the edge of the page, you must also add the bleed to the edges that crop or...
4 tags
Updated Nuke Collector script to work with spaces...
I have a habit of using underscores instead of spaces in folder names so you forget that many people don’t do this and it can cause problems for shell scripts. So I wrote a fix to my Nuke Scene Collector to address this. The only limitation is that, in order for the relinked copy of your Nuke scene file to work, you need to collect to a folder that has no spaces...
3 tags
Assign Maya nDynamics menu set to F7
nDynamics is meant to replace most dynamics functions in Maya but the F5 hotkey still set the menu set to the old dynamics set. Use this command in the Hotkey Editor to make nDynamics menus show up with F7 (manually set that in the key assignment option):
if (`menuSet -q -exists nDynamicsMenuSet`) { workingMode nDynamicsMenuSet; } else { warning "nDynamics Menu Set not found."; }
Thanks Dave...
6 tags
Converting Max V-Ray materials to Maya V-Ray...
Found this linked from CGSociety’s Maya forum and it’s so good, I thought I’d post a link here:
http://www.fxfx.org/index.php/2010/12/02/how-to-use-3d-studio-max-v-ray-material-in-maya-v-ray/
I occasionally use Max in Parallels Desktop 6 to do stuff like this. If you’re looking for a good virtualization app specifically for Windows 3D virtualization on the Mac,...
4 tags
Download updated EXR plug-in for Photoshop - no...
The EXR plug-in in Photoshop has had a longstanding issue where it would bake the alpha channel into the transparency, making renders kind of useless in a lot of cases. Adobe not too long ago quietly released a version of the plug-in that fixes this behaviour so that alpha channels show up as alpha channels:
Grab the plug-in here and be rid of this annoying behaviour forever.
4 tags
add icon previews to HDR and EXR files with my...
OS X has the native ability to preview 32-bit HDR and EXR files in the Finder or in open/save dialogs, which is one of the reasons why I use OS-native dialogs in Maya. But these previews can be slow to generate with QuickLook, so I use a sips (QuickTime command line) command and a Service I created to create hard-coded previews that applications can instantly see when opening:
Grab the...
3 tags
Use Maya mesh history to make tricky selections...
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Just got back from vacation in Mexico and I’ll have some great free textures from there to post soon. And a few gems like this:
In the meantime, here’s a tip to make tricky edge selections easier. There are some useful scripts for selecting the shortest edge path between two vertexes (ZenTools, which also has an awesome flood select tool) but...
5 tags
Fix stuck highlighted components in Maya with this...
I know a lot of people will want just this code from my Facer MEL script. It’s a simple script to cycle selections to remove unwanted component highlights that can get stuck within Maya. Select the affected object and cycle the component selection modes (vertex, faces, edges, UVs) or run this:
$mySelection = `ls...
