March 2012
15 posts
3 tags
Using Maya 2013's Node Editor to Add Jitter to...
Maya 2013 is nearly upon us and, if you have the Maya 2012 SAP, you already have its sweet new Node Editor. The Node Editor makes procedural animation a lot easier and I’m using it today to add randomness to the motion of an object. There are a lot of jitter scripts out there but the last thing I want is a ton of keyframes that will be annoying to manage on top of the object’s base...
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The Only Way to Avoid UV Seams
You can spend all day making low-compression UVs but if you have seams, there is only one way to avoid them showing up for displacements and normal maps (without using Ptex): they must meet parallel in UV space. There’s no way to have two pixels rotated along the seam and have them meet nicely. Notice my meteorite’s UVs and how the displacement is perfect along the seam:
A clearer...
5 tags
Material Worker Layer Updated in V-Ray Tuner 2.6.1
Maya’s material previews are pretty much useless. V-Ray’s are single-threaded so they are brutally slow – how many times have you tweaked an SSS shader and waited 10 seconds for an update that doesn’t really help? This is why I designed the Material Worker Layer in V-Ray Tuner 2.6 – to give you something actually helpful to look at when previewing materials. This would ostensibly...
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Making Meteorites in ZBrush
It’s always tempting to try and find an image to use as a displacement alpha when you’re doing mottled surfaces, but the best result always comes from mimicking reality and often that can be done procedurally. So, with that in mind, I grabbed the fast mallet preset brush from the Lightbox, selected a spherical alpha with a quick falloff at the edges and set it to spray mode for...
6 tags
A Quick Look at Bombs in Fracture FX for Maya
I’m planning on doing a bigger post about Fracture FX, which is a newly-released dynamics/explosion/shattering toolkit for Maya that is similar to something like Rayfire for Max. Unfortunately, today I’m finishing up two projects so it will have to wait but, in the meantime, check out how easy it is to do bombs with paint-based Voronoi shatters:
Fracture FX is currently on sale for...
nbreslow asked: Hi Dave, Great post on the cly_gestureSmoothing script. I have been using this for a while and find it incredibly useful. The hidden gem in this package is the cly_gesturePolySplitCtx; command which allows the creation of 'smooth' edge-loops (loops that take the curvature of the mesh into account). Softimage (2012) has a Smooth Edge Loop tool that is great and I am hopeful Maya will...
3 tags
Gesture-based Smoothing for Maya
We’ve all seen it: you finish a nice cage mesh that has the kind of flow and form you like but as soon as you smooth it with Catmull-Clark smoothing in Maya, ZBrush or Mudbox, it turns into a gloopy, blurred version of what you made. You’re left to sculpt back in some of that form before doing any detail work. Fortunately, there’s a script that will do better “gesture-based...
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Better Construction Planes in Maya
Just a few tips if you are using four image planes for reference when building a mesh from photographs or sketches. First, if your photo is taken inside with a wide-angle lens, use Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter to remove some of the distortion so you’re not trying to match something that’s showing too much if the centre and not enough of the sides:
Next, crop your images...
alexeygolev asked: Dear Dave, Thank you for your blog and for your book (an amazing read I must say). You mentioned using windows on mac. I wonder if you're using parallels or bootcamp. Recently I attempted to install 3ds max on windows xp under parallels and I didn't manage to run the one. It's stuck on "3ds max initialising" splash screen. I tried both 64 and 32 versions of winXP as well...
4 tags
Script to Save and Retain the Active Tool for Maya
I have a habit of writing scripts to fix workflow annoyances – it’s a bit of a fixation – but that’s good news for you. Here’s a script that will retain the active tool after saving your file in Maya:
BetterSaver.mel
Put that in your scripts folder and make a custom hotkey with “BetterSaver;” as control/command-s and, from then on, you will never have to reactivate...
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Replacing the DVD drive with a hard drive in a...
I just got a new quad-core 2.5GHz i7 17” MacBook Pro (Sandy Bridge) and it’s amazing for 3D and actually makes a serious dent in V-Ray renders when paired with my 12-core Mac Pro Xeon. But I didn’t buy it for the DVD drive. For my younger readers, “DVDs” and “CDs” were physical media formats that took up actual physical space and their primary appeal...
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Enabling V-Ray Distributed Rendering for Maya...
Someone asked how to do this on CGSociety and it’s pretty simple: Either save the Maya file with the Use distributed rendering set to on or add this preRender command to your command line render and it will activate DR even if your file doesn’t have it enabled:
Render -r vray -preRender "setAttr \"vraySettings.sys_distributed_rendering_on\" 1;" /Users/beige/Desktop/test.ma
Hype v. reality: The best iOS tools for... →
My article on professional creative tools for iOS. There are some really interesting 3D tools covered there as well.
6 tags
V-Ray Tuner 2.6 - Two New Features: Tiled...
Today I’m releasing a new version of V-Ray Tuner and it has a few things that should appeal to a lot of people:
Material Worker Layer
This script creates a temporary render layer with the selected V-Ray material mapped to a 1-metre sphere so you can tweak it with a basic lighting guide while evaluating it with V-Ray RT. Hit the Cleanup Elements button and the render layer and temp objects...
