Casey Hupke asked an interesting question today: “how can I get a Color SOP to automatically update its node color to match the picked color?” This reminded me of some other pipeline work I’d done in the past to customize existing nodes in Houdini; for example, adding a few spare Read more…
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the current pipeline I’m working on, but this essentially lets me use relative paths in Maya but WITHOUT using Maya’s outdated and inflexible workspace system.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…)
A quick script here to convert Gizmos in Nuke into Groups. Gizmos are nice in theory in that they provide reusable groups of nodes for users to interact with, but they’re often more trouble than they’re worth, especially if you need to send your Nuke scripts to someone else. Here’s Read more…
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…)
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’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…
A big part of how I started learning Python was to find out ways to port my old MEL scripts into Python. It’s always easier writing it the second time, not only because I already have the logic of the script down but because Python is a way, way better language than MEL. Seriously, I can hardly stand to look at MEL anymore. Anyways, one of the simpler scripts I wrote when I was starting off with MEL was a copy/paste script for the channel box. Maya is one of the most complex programs I’ve ever encountered and yet there is no built-in way to copy and paste attributes between objects. Whatever.
The script was really handy, but because I was really new at MEL it didn’t copy and paste between separate instances of Maya, and it only copied transform channels. This new one in Python takes advantage of the pickle module to store variables to a temporary file on the user’s hard drive, and retrieve them later when running the paste operation. Here’s what the code looks like:
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As promised, a useful post! And probably a long one.
As far as rendering goes, the problem that I see people running into more often than anything else is render layers mysteriously breaking, especially when file referencing is involved. The symptoms are typically either objects disappearing or Maya simply being unwilling to switch to a specific render layer, claiming in the Script Editor that there are “overrides to a node in a missing reference” or something to that effect. A lot of less experienced or just less technical types will try to solve the problem by either importing their references into the scene (which is rarely a good idea), or by screaming obscenities (which is exhilarating but ineffective). There is a better way to get your scene to render with no problems, and be able to use file referencing. The trick is to use shared render layers properly, only allow certain edits to your references in your final scene, and make sure that your references are clean.