March 2011
17 posts
6 tags
V-Ray Tuner 2 released – Updated for V-Ray for...
It’s done! After many new things being added and a serious upgrade of both my knowledge of V-Ray and my MEL skills, it’s a big improvement over the last version and includes many things specifically for V-Ray for Maya 2.0, which just went into public beta testing for people who pre-ordered it. Grab it here. The major changes are:
Added per-light pass rendering script. More on this...
If You Are a Mac Designer and Use PDFs with...
I just had to roll back to 10.6.6 because we’re going to press with this magazine today.
All you need to know right here.
The Goofiest After Effects Benchmark Ever?
I certainly hope so.
3 tags
Simple "Select Objects By Name" Prompt MEL Script
I made a very simple MEL prompt to select meshes by name:
string $text;
string $result = `promptDialog
-title "Select Object"
-message "Enter Name:"
-button "OK" -button "Cancel"
-defaultButton "OK" -cancelButton "Cancel"
-dismissString "Cancel"`;
if ($result == "OK") {
$text = `promptDialog -query -text`;
}
select -r ("*" + $text + "*");
string $saSel[] = `ls -sl -l...
Using Maya Merge Vertices tool as a Workaround for...
Maya’s Bridge tool is great for merging gaps – when it works. Often it just grabs another edge that’s far away to bridge to, so you end up with less of a bridge and more of a spiral staircase. Unless you’re prepared to spin one of the parts until the Bridge merge works correctly, the fastest way (I can think of) is by using the Merge Vertices tool with extruded edges and doing a...
6 tags
Anonymous asked: Hi,
Is there any chance to know when will we have the opportunity of using Your vraytuner2 with the light size synch function? For me it would be the most helpful update ever. Right now, sizing the lights with the sliders is a pain like nothing else.
Is there any chance to know when will we have the opportunity of using Your vraytuner2 with the light size synch function? For me it would be the most helpful update ever. Right now, sizing the lights with the sliders is a pain like nothing else.
5 tags
Essential Mac Graphics Utility: CodeBox
CodeBox is a text snippet utility for OS X that puts your code snippets in the OS X menu bar. It’s like a clipboard organizer but with code in mind:
It may seem strange to recommend a coding text utility for graphics but in 3D and compositing, text parameters come up often and programs like Nuke actually keep clipboard parameters and scene data in ASCII text, so you can use CodeBox...
5 tags
Mac/Unix Tip: Pause and Resume Renders
One of the great things about Unix systems is really fine-grained control you get over running processes and, combined with a Unix system’s scriptability, this makes it trivial to do stuff like pause a rendering to get more CPU time for something else. If you have a client visiting and he or she wants to see something while you’ve got a batch rendering running, you don’t need to...
5 tags
Quick on the Draw: Speeding up Maya with proxies
Most people who are new to Maya work with way too many polygons by default and assume they need a bajillion-dollar graphics card to cope with the ridiculous amount of triangles their machine needs to draw. While that may be true when working in an app like Mudbox (but not ZBrush – it doesn’t use the GPU or graphics card memory), Maya and renderers have ways of dealing efficiently with these...
Anonymous asked: Hi, I'm french and a bit new in vray for maya, and i've to finish a job to render a video of iPhone customized with diamonds all around (around 1000 diamonds)…
My problem it than I just changed my old MacBook Pro to a Mac Pro 12core 16Go ATI Radeon HD 5870 and i think the hyper-threading not work properly with my scene because the render time takes 10 time longer...
My problem it than I just changed my old MacBook Pro to a Mac Pro 12core 16Go ATI Radeon HD 5870 and i think the hyper-threading not work properly with my scene because the render time takes 10 time longer...
Anonymous asked: I am torn between the HP Envy 17, the AlienWare M17x R3 and the MacBook Pro 17".
I am a student majoring in animation at QUT. I guess I would be moving my laptop around but I don't think power would be a problem, I can probably find a plug anywhere. I do a little bit of animation right now on my desktop ( AMD Phenom II x4 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2, ATI 4670
1GB DDR3) and...
I am a student majoring in animation at QUT. I guess I would be moving my laptop around but I don't think power would be a problem, I can probably find a plug anywhere. I do a little bit of animation right now on my desktop ( AMD Phenom II x4 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2, ATI 4670
1GB DDR3) and...
6 tags
Essential Mac/Windows graphics software:...
People who work with a lot of textures and stock need efficient ways of sorting through that stuff and image metadata is one of the best ways of finding content quickly. I have gigs and gigs of textures and whenever I get a new texture pack, I always run the images through Expression Media to tag images with descriptive keywords. Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro), is $200, so be warned...
6 tags
The importance of using realistic scene scale with...
I did a quick test render of my Brahms model the other day with Maxwell Render and saw what looked to me to be a bug:
The model rendered fine in other renderers but, after some investigation by Next Limit’s Maya peeps, it was discovered that the problem was with the scene scale:
The problem is that the mesh is small (about 0.5 cm in diameter) and very dense, so the triangles are...
7 tags
Creating a monitor profile for Nuke for accurate...
Nuke is one of those programs that doesn’t currently have support for ICC colour profiles, so it doesn’t automatically compensate for your display the way that Photoshop or a browser like Safari or Firefox does. You may see “sRGB” in the Viewer menu but without this compensation, it’s never going to match the actual sRGB rendering that Photoshop and others will do...
8 tags
Made a V-Ray for Maya material to MaxScript...
I don’t like Max. I hate it, really. I even bought digitalRaster’s Switcher ($70 Maya-style navigation for Max) for those few times I need to use it to make Max-compatible scenes for the Turbosquid assets I sell. Max models with V-Ray materials are needed to appeal to the largest potential customer base, so these people shouldn’t be ignored if you sell stock models. So, deciding...
4 tags
Using stroke on path with masks to clean up bake...
I’ve been playing with the Topogun 2 beta and it’s amazing at generating low-topology models quickly and baking out maps. I occasionally get blips in the maps though, due to samples around the source mesh’s UVs, so this is a technique I use with noisy renders to clean them up. Draw a path along the problem samples, make a copy of the layer, do a Dust and Scratches filter on the...
