maya

Maya

automated path substitution in maya.

I’m trying to build a system right now that can automatically substitute environment variables for paths on a per-scene basis. When a user opens a Maya file, I want to parse that file and set temporary environment variables called $SHOW, $SEQ and $SHOT that point to the show’s root folder, the sequence’s folder in that show, or the shot in that sequence. The variable names and paths I’m trying to get are pretty specific to the current pipeline I’m working on, but this essentially lets me use relative paths in Maya but WITHOUT using Maya’s outdated and inflexible workspace system. I don’t want an individual Maya project for every single shot and asset in the entire show, and I don’t want all of my Maya scenes to be forced to live within a single workspace, either.

I’ve solved this problem before by using symbolic links to basically force all of the Maya projects generated for every single shot and asset to link to the same place. This makes for a pretty busy-looking file system, though, and symlinks only work on Unix-based servers (i.e. not Windows). This system I’m building now looks a lot more like Houdini’s global variables… as long as I define $SHOW or $SHOT or whatever, I can path a reference or a texture to $SHOT/assets/whatever.xyz and it doesn’t necessarily have to be within a Maya workspace, and it’s also not an absolute path.

Read more below… (more…)

By toadstorm, ago
Houdini

Rendering huge Houdini meshes in V-Ray.

I’m working on a production right now that involves sending absolutely enormous animated meshes (6.5 million polygons on average with a changing point count every frame) out of Houdini and into Maya for rendering. Normally it would be best to just render everything directly out of Houdini, but sometimes you don’t have as many Houdini licenses (or artists) as you’d like so you have to make do with what you have.

If the mesh were smaller, or at least not animated, I’d consider using the Alembic format since V-Ray can render it directly as a VRayProxy, but for a mesh this dense animating over a long sequence, the file sizes would be impossibly huge since Alembics can’t be output as sequences. Trying to load an 0.5 TB Alembic over a small file server between 20 machines trying to render the sequence and you can see why Alembic might not be ideal for this kind of situation.

Hit the jump below to see the solution.
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By toadstorm, ago
Maya

Ptex weirdness in VRay.

I’ve been messing around with using Ptex in VRay for Maya and ran into a particularly weird little problem involving a normal map exported from Mudbox. It’s probably easier to show it than to tell about it (Fig. 1): That wax wrapper looks terrible… not at all like the original Read more…

By toadstorm, ago
Maya

dealing with layouts in maya

Many operations in Maya will run faster if Maya doesn’t have to refresh the viewport while running them. For example, if you switch the viewport to only show the Graph Editor before baking animation, or caching particles or Alembic geometry, the operation will happen much faster than if Maya had to actually display the geometry for each frame that it’s being baked. There is probably a way via the API to tell Maya’s viewport not to refresh, but since I don’t know shit about the API, here’s a workaround using a few of Maya’s less-documented MEL commands and some Python.

I wrote this method assuming that artists would want to cache out information frequently without it disrupting their workflow. That means that I needed to first store the user’s current panel layout, then switch it to something that doesn’t require a refresh on every frame (like the Graph Editor), and then restore the previously restored layout.

I prefer coding in Python, but some of the procedures I’m running are MEL functions that are found in scripts/startup and so they’re not documented and they don’t have Python equivalents. A hybrid approach is the best way to handle it, since MEL is terrible.

Click for some Python code… (more…)

By toadstorm, ago
Maya

baking maya scene time warp

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:

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By toadstorm, ago
Maya

python in maya standalone

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…

By toadstorm, ago
Maya

applying displacement in vray

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…

By toadstorm, ago
Maya

more problems with render layers

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…)

By toadstorm, ago