Small Maintenance Update to V-Ray Tuner for Maya 2014

V-Ray Tuner 3.4.1 posted for download. There’s not too much new here but there’s an important fix for the Optimize button script for Maya 2014. Maya 2014 has a bug that returns the wrong number for RAM amount for “memory -phy” so, if you’re running 2014, the script asks you to enter your memory amount in GB. Otherwise, the only other new addition is that I’ve added Point Light support to per-light render script.

Pose Deformer Maya 2014 Mac build

Michael Comet’s Pose Deformer Mac Maya 2014 build can be downloaded here. I am using the latest updated source that David Johnson has tweaked to fix an issue with compiles on 2014. The Windows version is available on his djx blog here. I’m bundling the Python version of the Pose Reader plug-in but it seems to have an issue where it complains about a missing connection but everything works fine. I’m looking into it.

V-Ray Tuner 3.4 Update Releasededed

This is not a huge update to V-Ray Tuner but it brings a few fixes and features that affect various things. Here’s 3.4 changelog:

• Composite pre-bake diffuse colour with V-Ray Dirt RE:

• Changed DaveBake420 10% value to be 512x512, instead of 409.6x409.6 (10% of 4096).
• Attach Cam button now prompts you to add and enable physical cam attributes if you don’t have them already on the selected camera. If you select no, it will still hook up the overscan setting.
• materialDropper and materialCopyDropper now work on face-level selections as well as with objects.
• Optimize button now sets memory setting (sys_rayc_dynMemLimit) to 80% of total memory in your system.
• Fixed material worker layer script. I had started to implement a new feature but forgot to finish it so it was broken for a couple versions.
• Per-light render script now does solo light re-renders. If you have a light selected and run per-light render, it will only render that selected light:

• Small fix to per light exposure light tweak - it could fail to properly detect your light selection before.
• Revert To Saved Document script added to Utils menu.

A Script for Photoshop to Rename the Layer With The Document Name

Update: now with JavaScript version for Windows/OS X.

I do a lot of composites of similar images or render passes, so I like to have the document name as the layer name so it’s clear which document was used for the layer. I don’t know much about scripting Photoshop but I managed to piece together a very basic AppleScript to do exactly that, so grab it here if you want to:

Here is a Windows/OS X-compatible JavaScript version, courtesy of David Jensen. Tested in OS X PS CS6 and CS5 for Windows. Put it in your Photoshop folder/Presets/Scripts folder and it will appear in the File/Scripts menu.

The original AppleScript is here: Rename Front Doc with Document Name AppleScript.

Here it is in action:

I use this script so often that I ended up putting the script into an iKey hotkey so I don’t need to the AppleScript Editor to run it manually. I highly recommend iKey if you want a keyboard automation app for OS X. I also used it to map command-shift-z to command-y for Nuke’s redo function and it does a bunch of other auto-typing stuff for me.

iCollide – Another Amazing (and free) Maya Plug-in

Yesterday, I plugged (nyuk) iDeform, Ingo Clemens’ free Maya plug-in for real-time displacement previewing. If you look around Ingo’s blog, you’ll find a bunch of other great scripts and plug-ins and iCollide definitely warrants a mention. It’s basically L3Deformer’s collision deformer for free:

While I’m Making More Hotkeys – Here’s a Context-aware Create Render Node Script

I got tired of opening the Create Render Node dialog from menus, since I use it so much, so I made another hotkey script. This will bind a material if you have an object selected (like the right-click Create Material selection) or it will just create a new node if nothing is selected, which is good for shader building in the Node Editor or Hypergraph:


global proc createNoderr()
{
if (size(`ls -sl`) > 0)
{
createAssignNewMaterialTreeLister "";
}
else
{
hyperShadePanelMenuCommand("hyperShadePanel1", "createNewNode");
}
}


Download link:

createNoderr.mel

Updated Hotkey Script for Material Selection à la Maya Right-click Menu

So, a while ago I posted a handy hotkey script to bring up the Attribute Editor for the selected object’s material but it didn’t work properly with face-level component selections, if there were multiple materials on the mesh (this is also a problem for showShadingGroupAttrEditor). You can see the difference between the old script and the new one here (with my Venetian Snares playing in iTunes – oops):

Here’s an updated script that works well – put it in your Maya hotkeys and assign it to a key combo. The openAEWindow at the start ensures that you don’t get that weird hiccup fallback to the shape node if the AE window isn’t already open. Here’s a download link (updated to work with object and face selections):

materialEditorHotkey.mel

Put it in your scripts folder and call it from a hotkey with materialEditorHotkey; in the User hotkey text field:

Update 2: now does a select toggle for component mode, so you don’t lose your face selections when it does it’s thing.

V-Ray Tuner 3.3 Gets the Hot Feature Injection

I am pretty happy with the latest V-Ray Tuner 3.3 update. It adds a number of features that I now use constantly and I think they’ll be pretty popular. Here’s a break down of what’s new in 3.3:

• Optimize setting now prompts you for core count when distributed rendering is on. Use the max threads of any of your machines that are active in the render. If you have a local machine that’s eight cores (or four hyperthreaded) and a slave machine that has 16-cores hyperthreaded (32-threads), enter 32. Disable DR and click Optimize again and it will properly set the thread count for the local machine only:

• Added a disable texture filtering script to Materials menu so you can turn off filtering for File nodes all at once.
• DaveBake420 script has got a big uprade in 3.3. Now has an option to comp your Dirt V-Ray pass with the diffuse channel after baking. Good for adding grittiness to diffuse textures with little work:

• Fix Light Size button replaced with create Sun & Sky script. V-Ray no longer has issues with manually-scaled lights so the script is no longer necessary.
• Sprite Maker script now works with currently selected camera, not just main persp camera.
• New Material Swapper script that should replace the “Maya and mental ray Mat to VRay” script for conversion of Maya materials to V-Ray mats and back. Paul Dreisen graciously provided the original script but I tend to convert more between Maya’s materials and V-Ray than mental ray mats and I wanted to beef up the accuracy of conversion that’s done by the script to save time. This script does a really good job of converting things like Phong materials from Mudbox FBX files to V-Ray, with all channel-mapped texture intact. If you want to go back to Mudbox but you’ve set up a V-Ray Material, it will swap the V-Ray Mat for a similarly set-up Phong, Lambert or Blinn mat. It’s also great for mass-converting Paint Effects polygon materials. Here it is in action:

It’s not shown in that video but the release script now has a palette with an option to keep the original swapped-out mats after conversion.

As always, let me know if there’s anything you want added or tweaked in V-Ray Tuner.

New Free Maya Script: Automatic Project Path Setter

After getting tired of manually setting project paths for files that were already open, I made a simple script that does exactly that and then prompts you to reopen the file so assets from relative paths load correctly:

The script assumes that you are using the standard project/scenes format, with the currently open file in the /scenes/ folder. There are some scripts out there can monitor your Maya session and do this automatically but I personally hate scripts that do stuff for me with added polling. Maya is a fickle beast, so the last thing I need is another thing adding potential instability. So, grab it here lest ye waste more time by doing it manually.

If you want the script shown in the video that opens your active project images folder, grab that here.

GoP 2.0 Adds Camera Support to Scenes Sent to Photoshop

So I’ve updated GoP with some handy changes which bring it up to version 2.0 (download link). If you don’t know GoP, it’s a script that lets you send selected objects in Maya to Photoshop for texturing. The original version used the OBJ format as a go-between but 2.0 now uses .dae COLLADA format, which has some nice advantages – most notably, camera support:

As you tell, that has great potential to be used as an aid for matte painting or texturing with specific angles in mind. By default, Photoshop opens 3D files as square, but you can get the correct cropping for your scene by matching the aspect ratio or dimensions of your Maya scene:

As you can see above, this also supports basic coloured Maya lights. I can’t claim any credit for this stuff. It’s just Adobe’s excellent COLLADA support that’s doing all the work. You may need Photoshop CS6 for camera import support but meshes will import fine. Anyway, this should come in handy as Adobe adds more and more 3D features to Photoshop Extended.

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