This mel script creates a renderLayer that can be used to quickly render mattes for selected objects or groups of objects with the VRay for Maya renderer.
As you can see from the screen shot, djVRayCreateMatteLayer.mel looks very similar to the mentalray mattePassMaker.mel script which I wrote about in my previous post. In fact djVRayCreateMatteLayer.mel is an attempt to emulate the mentalray matte pass functionality using "VRay Render Elements".
At this point in time I am fairly new to vray and vray is relatively new to maya so djVRayCreateMatteLayer.mel should be viewed as a work-in-progress, but one you may find useful if you ever need to create mattes using vray. (more...)
You can use this script to create black and white matte renders using mentalray's pass system which means that it takes no longer to render 100 mattes than it does to render one. And since the script makes it so easy to set up these passes you can render a separate matte for every object in your scene, if thats what you want, or for combinations of objects that you select or based on the materials that are assigned. (more...)
In preparation for upgrading to maya 2011, I'm recompiling plugins that I rely on. This one, called spReticle, required a small code fix to work with 2011.
spReticle is an open source offering from Sony Pictures Imageworks that gives you the ability to add customizable viewport overlays like gate masks and safe guides and much more.
You can get it from my downloads page.
Put the plugin (mll file) in your plugins folder and the mel files in your scripts folder. Use the plugin manager to load the plugin, then to create a reticle node use the following command:
spReticleLoc;
This will set up a reticle with a 16:9 transparent gate mask with 4:3 center-cut action/title safe lines, frame numbers in the top left corner, scene name top center. You can modify all these to you liking and add many variations using the attribute editor.
Earlier this year I wrote my two step guide to Linear Workflow. Since then I have received a lot of email about it. It's a tricky one to explain in simple terms. I did my best to narrow down my description to cover the basic concepts. Some people got it. But I can tell from the email, that others saw gap's that I did not adequately fill.
Luckily for all of us. Fredrik Averpil has written an excellent article on Linear Workflow in Maya 2010 with pictures and diagrams and examples of how this also applies to compositing in Nuke 6. You can check it out here.
The title says it all. The original post is here if you don't know about this one.
Thanks to E.Ozgur Yilmaz for compiling this one. Look for the link near the bottom of the downloads page.
I've compiled it but have no way to test it, so if you have problems with it let me know. Get it from the downloads page.
Maya 2011 users can get the freshly compiled windows x64 version of Comet's PoseDeformer plugin from my downloads page.
Let me know if you need the 32 bit version. I can only do windows compiles, but if someone wants to do the OSX version let me know and I can link to it.
I noticed that some people using wacom tablets find the stylus version of the right-mouse button to be a little clumsy. Since maya makes extensive use of right-mouse-button menus I wanted to see if I could find an alternative. As luck would have it, Roger Klado had already figured it all out and written it up in great detail, so all I had to do was extract the bits I needed and put them into a mel script.
The result is djObjMenu.mel. Make a shelf button or marking menu with this command
djObjMenu;
Run it and you'll find that CTRL+LeftMouseClick invokes the same behaviour in the viewport as the RightMouseClick. So for a stylus that would be CTRL+penDown instead of hover+sideButton. Some people may find this easier or more direct. Let me know if you do. I don't use a stylus, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Look for djObjMenu.mel on my downloads page.
Update: I've realized that CTRL+LeftMouseClick is normally used in component mode to deselect things. If you run djObjMenu from userSetup.mel then you'll lose the ability to deselect components (unless you want to use Shift-LeftMouseClick to toggle them). Therefore I think it would be better to run djObjMenu from a shelf button, to be used when you are animating rather than modeling. Then restart maya to revert to normal. I'm going to look into making the script detect whether the context is component mode to avoid the conflict, but that may take me a while to figure out. I'll have to read Roger's instructions again!
So, I've edited my original post to remove the suggestion about userSetup.mel, which I've replaced with a shelf button suggestion. Apologies if I confused anybody.
Here's a simple method you can use to add a bump map to the mi_car_paint_phen_x material without using custom shaders or complicated shading networks.
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