Open Images Script Updated for Gnome in Linux

Haven’t been posting much lately because I was in NYC for an Adobe thing and then finished my Photoshop CS6 review, which should be up on Ars Technica next week. In the meantime, I’ve been testing a monstrous HP Z820 E5 Xeon workstation for a review I’m doing for Ars. I’ve got it running CentOS 6.2 and, while it’s not what I’d call easy to set up (EXR images from Maya are broken for some reason and I can’t drag to another screen with Maya), it’s noticeably faster for OpenGL with the Quadro 4000 than it is in OS X (and even Windows 7). I’ll be covering all that in my review but in the meantime, here’s a copy of my Open Images MEL script that’s updated for Gnome support. Run “openImagesFolder” from the MEL command line and it will open the currently-active project’s image folder in the desktop on all OSes. Handy to save digging around to check renders.

Make V-Ray Proxy Automator Service Updated

I made this Automator service a while ago for making V-Ray Proxies and I added a prompt for the face count.

Grab the service here. Should work in OS X 10.6 and above.

V-Ray Tuner 2.6.2 Posted for Download

I think a lot of people will like the new render utility preview added in V-Ray Tuner 2.6.2:

When you build complex shaders, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what a stage looks like by looking at the end result, so that’s why I made the render utility preview. I recommend using the non-OpenCL RT for this feature since RT GPU has very limited support for shader network types. The facing ratio used above is one that doesn’t work in OpenCL mode.

The render utility preview works with pretty much anything you throw at it (utility or procedural texture) if V-Ray RT supports it. It just maps the utility to a surface shader, which has no shading properties so it shows you just what the utility looks like, unshaded. As usual, all temporary surface shaders, render layers and objects are removed on hitting the Cleanup Material Elements button. This won’t make garbage in your scene that you have to manually remove.

Other changes in 2.6.2:

• Material Worker Layer no longer makes a folder in your temp images when you hit IPR Render button (use the palette IPR button). If you use the render view’s IPR button, folders will still be made
• When you remove the Material Worker Layer, it puts the camera position back to where it was before you started tweaking the material
• Added Car Paint material support to Material Worker Layer
• Added Distributed Render Settings to Utilities menu for quick toggling of DR slaves

Interactive Command Line Nuke script

I made a simple shell script to use for interactively prompting start and end frames:

Same logic as the Maya one here. Here’s the download link:

http://www.can-con.ca/tumblrpics/nukeme.zip

Just set up your $PATH variable for Nuke or put an absolute path to the Nuke binary in your script. Works in OS X and Linux.

Automator Service to QuickLook a Selected Path

I made a simple service to use QuickLook to preview the selected absolute file path. Handy for previewing something before using rm or, here, to verify that my distributed V-Ray render is okay:

Download the service for OS X 10.7 and above.

PoseDeformer Mac Maya 2013 Build

Here’s a download of PoseDeformer for Maya 2013 OS X. People looking for a Windows or Linux build should keep an eye on this page.

Get the Python versions of the PoseReader plugin here. Both plug-ins are required. That Python version works with all platforms and versions of Maya so I won’t be compiling the poseReader plugin.

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 let you turn off the preview swatch rendering and never waste time again:

I just updated this feature to give the preview shapes better lighting and I have more more preview shapes available for your test material:

I also put a Distributed Rendering (DR) checkbox in the place of the “World Scale for Light Cache” (WS) toggle. I think there are a lot more people who are going to want to toggle that frequently than there are people who want to toggle WS. It works great - no more opening the Settings render panel for enabling DR, something I’m using more frequently now that my laptop is beastly. Here’s the V-Ray Tuner download link.

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 the tool after saving.

V-Ray Tuner 2.6 - Two New Features: Tiled Rendering and Material Worker Layer

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 are gone:

Yes, I realize I set the IOR below 1, which is stupid but it was just to show the point of the worker layer. I will make the lighting a little more sophisticated in the next release and add options for object type and size.

Tiled Command Line Rendering

I’ve seen a few people ask for this for times when they have to render giant posters which cause memory problems. So I implemented a tiled rendering batch script that will use the command line, so you’re using as little memory as possible. It has options for two, four or nine tiles:

As you can see from the video, Photoshop’s “Load Files into Stack” script works perfectly to assemble the images. Tip: when rendering very large scenes, you should generally use Brute Force (Primary GI) and Light Cache (Secondary GI) to reduce memory usage versus Irradiance Maps.

Other small tweaks:

Added Linux support for sleep after render and Optimize button no longer changes dynamic mesh setting to static. V-Ray 2 fixed the problem with slower dynamic mesh rendering. Here’s the download link again. Enjoy and, if you find V-Ray Tuner useful and you’re looking for some Maya tips, maybe considering picking up my 101 Autodesk® Maya® Tips ebook that is getting very good reviews. This ends the mom-like guilt portion of my post.

101 Autodesk Maya Tips - My Ebook of Maya Power Tips

It’s up! My 101 Autodesk Maya Tips ebook has been published on the Amazon Kindle store for English markets and is also available on the European stores (Germany, Italy, France). For people who don’t own a Kindle, it’s also available in a wide variety of electronic formats on Smashwords, where you can get DRM-free EPUB, PDF, HTML, Mobi and RTF versions. The ebook includes links to some free scripts, which are available here if you’re just looking for something free to download. Here’s the cover design:

You can sample the first few pages of the book on the Amazon or Smashwords purchase pages. I’m working on an iPad edition with videos, but the static edition has plenty of images and a logical flow that make it easy to follow.

Don’t call me “broad”

The included tips and techniques are meant to appeal to a variety of Maya users – from amateurs to professionals. You’re probably wondering “how can you make something that appeals to such a broad spectrum of people using such a huge application?” It wasn’t easy, but this is a well-honed list of tips and tricks that I’ve been building while working over the past year, always keeping that varied audience in mind. Over the past couple months I’ve been putting the final touches on it, making sure the tips work across OS X, Windows and Linux machines (some tips like Put your machine to sleep after a render involve OS-level commands), building the layout, having it proofread (thanks again to Eric Regener for that), and testing it on a variety of devices. The initial reviews seem to echo that I’ve done a good job of appealing to Maya users across all platforms and fields (animation, lighting, visualization, games, etc). Some of the tips are available on my blog – Force plug-ins to load at startup, Interacting with maya in headless modes, Keep displacement maps correct after scaling objects, Vary the accuracy of interactive translations, for example – but most are unique to the ebook. Also, many people wanted something they could use as a reference, so that’s why this was created.

Some examples from the ebook

If you’re wondering what kind of things are included, here are some of the tips: Get up and running with command line renders, Cloud-syncing your scripts folder with Dropbox and symlinks, Removing “unknown nodes” warnings so you can save as a different format, Opening files written from crashes without digging through folders, Fixing corrupt Maya prefs without deleting all your settings, Pause renders, Shortcut to show the material attributes for selected object, Maya 2012 SAP/Maya 2013 Node Editor tips, Using the Maya ASCII format creatively, Get rid of Maya 2011 and 2012 lags, Let the Channel Box do the math for you, and many more. For $2.99, everyone I’ve spoken to who’s read it agreed that it was a great price for all the things they learned, and some of these people have been using Maya for many years in Hollywood film VFX production.

So, what about your blog?

The blog is still going to be chock full of useful information, tips and tricks. Because the ebook is tailored to Maya users of all stripes, I don’t get into the nitty-gritty of V-Ray, ZBrush, creative workflows or compositing in external app like Photoshop or Nuke. Now that I’m finished the ebook, it will also give me more time to focus on the blog, so I’m happy about that.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy 101 Autodesk Maya Tips and appreciate your reviews on the purchase sites.

Update: the interactive iPad edition has been published (Direct link to iTunes store).

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