A short film that I worked on with a friend of mine, director Dan Blank, is finally out to the public! I was the CG Supervisor, and I handled all of the lighting, materials and rendering in addition to the overall pipeline. Take a look at this article from The Read more…
I’m working on a project right now that involves exporting cached geometry from Houdini to Maya. The Alembic node makes that a fairly painless process now that Houdini and Maya both support Alembic import/export, although it turns out that getting any data other than point positions and normals is kind Read more…
I just ran into a hideous problem when I was trying to bake out cameras and animation from one scene, and get the animation into another. I always keep my lighting scenes separate from the animators’ scenes so they can’t mess up my shots. Unfortunately, the animator had used a Scene Time Warp, and then baked out the animation, which of course never quite lined up correctly and we couldn’t figure out what was going on. Turns out that keys baked under a Time Warp will not actually bake the Time Warp itself.
Here’s a script, then, to bake the effects of the time warp on all selected objects. It then (optional, but recommended) deletes the time warp from the scene entirely:
I’ve been working on some tools recently that open groups of Maya scenes in batch mode, running Python or MEL operations on each file (for example, to quickly add a render layer and apply materials to a large group of objects at once, or to get the names of all Read more…
I was just talking to a colleague about his problems using displacement maps with VRay, and then remembered my confusion when I first tried to work with them. So here’s a post about it! Normally in Maya/mental ray, when you want to apply a displacement map you just create a Read more…
I’ve been working on a set of tools for making flexible, twistable arms and legs quickly. I haven’t rigged in a long time, so this has been an arduous process, but I’ll post notes about what I run into along the way. One problem that I remember having over and Read more…
A lot of After Effects compositors like to use a plugin to allow texture substitution on objects, called Re:Map. You render out a special color pass from your 3D scene, and then the plugin uses those colors to wrap a flat image onto the object, basically allowing you to re-texture Read more…
I recently took a staff position at the up-and-coming Gentleman Scholar Studios in Santa Monica. I’ll be their “Technical Director,” which more or less means I’ll be doing more of the same old scripting, lighting and materials. Which is totally fine with me… these guys are gonna be big. Also on Read more…
I am a huge advocate of using shared render layers in a file referencing pipeline. It’s probably the only reasonable way of allowing lighters, animators, riggers and FX artists to work on shots and assets simultaneously. That being said, it isn’t without its weaknesses (many of which I talked about in an earlier post). The latest one I encountered happens with scenes with TONS of objects… not necessarily a high polygon count, but just lots and lots of individual DAG nodes. Take a look… (more…)
I’ve been working on a project that incorporates a lot of models that were made by duplicating or importing things into a scene over and over again. When this happens, you have lots of nodes that will have the same name, and Maya will differentiate between them by tacking the Read more…