A while back I did a mod for the hypershade window to add a button for toggling the updating of the thumbnails. Turning off updates can improve performance when you are modifying complex shader networks. I've just added a version for maya 2012. The hyperShadePanel.rar on the downloads page now contains 2 new hyperShadePanel.mel versions - for 2011 & 2012 mel script (put the one you need in your local scripts folder) and 2 new bitmaps in the png format (put both of these in your local icons folder).
update: added 2011 version to the rar file, as well as fixing a small autodesk created bug in the 2012 version where the width of the create tab always took up half the window when first opened (bug fix thanks to Ingo Clemens). If you downloaded in the last last 24 hours you may want to get this update.
update 2: Added improved thumbnailUpdatesGreyed.png icon for the button disabled state - created by Mike Smith-Kennard (thanks MSK)
Maya 2012 came with a nice looking dynamics plugin called physX and it creates a shelf when it loads.
However I don't like the way this becomes the active shelf every time I start maya. I suppose I could unload the plugin, but then I'll have to reload it every time I need it. Fortunately physX uses mel scripts to initialize the plugin and create the shelf, so I modified one called physxUI.mel and added some code to re-select the shelf that was active before physX loaded.
If you are fussy about your active shelf and want to give the mod a try get physxUI.mel from my downloads page and drop it in your local scripts folder.
update: I tried this fix on another computer and it did not work. I'm not sure if I got lucky with the first one or unlucky with the 2nd. I think that success or failure has something to do with the order that maya does things at startup. Based on that theory. I've changed my modification slightly, so you'll need to download it again. And there is now an extra requirement: In addition to dropping the new physxUI.mel mod into your local scripts folder, you must also add the following line to your userSetup.mel
source physxUI.mel; storePreviousShelf();
This is now working on every computer I've tested it on. Yes. Both of them!
The attribute editor in Maya 2012 keeps expanding the Notes roll-out. I'd never noticed this being quite so annoying in previous versions. I'm pretty sure that previously, once I closed it by dragging the divider bar to the bottom of the window, it stayed like that until I pulled it up again. Now, in maya 2012 it seems to jump up again as soon as I deselect anything. Most of the time this is a waste of space for me.
Fortunately I recently read a simple solution posted on cgtalk by ginodauri. To hide the notes roll-out you can use the following mel command
layout -e -vis 0 AEaddOrEditNotesLayout;
To make this even easier I thought it would be good to add a menu item to the List menu in the attribute editor.
So you can turn it on and off and maya remembers your last choice between sessions.
This functionality is added by modifying a copy of one of the maya installation files called showEditor.mel which can be placed in your local scripts folder to avoid messing up the maya install. You can get the mod for maya 2012 from my downloads page.
I've updated the rar files on my downloads page to include maya 2012-x64 (windows) versions of Michael Comet's Pose Deformer and the Sony Pictures Reticle (aka spReticle).
There is a long, long thread on cgTalk called "Forests in maya mental ray". The discussion is all about techniques for creating and rendering the vast numbers of polygons needed to make convincing grass and trees in large numbers.
Maya's paintFX can be used to make trees which can be converted to polygons with leaves that consist of just a few polys per leaf. Texture maps (color, opacity, bump etc) are then applied. The default output from the paintFX conversion has each leaf mapped to fill the standard uv quadrant, so each leaf gets a copy of the texture. This can look pretty good, but the repetition is usually very obvious. You could break the leaf mesh into a few parts and assign variations of the leaf textures to each part. But a more efficient way is to layout the uv's so that groups of leaves are mapped to different parts of the uv quadrant in a 4x4 tiled patternfor example. Then you can make a texture map with leaf variations arranged in the same 4x4 tile pattern. Now you can have 16 different looking leaves on the tree, almost as easily as you can have one.
Default paintFX conversion gives you this
But what you really want is something like this 4x4 tile pattern (or maybe 2x2 or 3x3)
The problem is that you might have 50,000 leaves on your tree. It would be very difficult to select and edit the uv's for different leaves by hand. This is something that needs to be automated (more...)
Maya 2011 lets you choose between two different "Dialog Styles" for interacting with the file system.
This one, called "Maya default"
or this one called "OS native"
This is the UI you see when you do things like open or save, import or export a file. The default (called "Maya default") lets you do more than just choose a file, and some people will probably find the extra capability quite useful. But I'm not one of those people. I prefer the "OS native" style of dialog. I prefer it because it is consistent with most other applications. Its great to have the choice to use one or the other.
What's not so great is that the OS native dialog does not correctly filter the file list... (more...)
Ever since I can remember, maya has had an annoying bug that causes materials to display incorrectly in the viewport in both "Smooth shade all" and "Textured" modes.
If you've ever encountered something similar to this error
// Error: file: D:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2011/scripts/AETemplates/AEhardwareTextureTemplate.mel line 721: Found no attribute match for "mia_material_x1.diffuse" //
or this one
// Error: file: D:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2011/scripts/AETemplates/AEhardwareTextureTemplate.mel line 827: Object 'VRayMtl_qualityMenu' not found. //
then you may be interested in a workaround. Its not perfect, but its better than nothing.
(more...)
This time last year I started a new job at a new studio. For me, this was a big change since I had been at the previous studio (one that I helped build from almost nothing) more than 20 years.
My new job has given me the opportunity to learn several new applications and as a result I have found little time to update my blog and it has been very much neglected.
So to begin a new year of enthusiastic blogging, I've decided to write a (long, possibly boring) post about what I've been doing the last 12 months. It is just a quick rundown of changes affecting my general workflow. If you are still interested, keep reading (btw... the photo is my new puppy, Hollywood) (more...)
I may have been a little naive thinking that I could simply copy a few scripts from one install to the other and upgrade my sp1 install to subscription advantage pack without the name change. Well it almost worked but as it turns out the instructions in my previous post missed some things.
I've updated the list of files that need to be copied and I should point out that the additions (marked with a "+") will overwrite existing files in the sp1 install. Normally I wouldn't advise doing something like this, but its a bit of a special case. We have both installation packages at hand and they are both fresh installs. If something goes wrong we can just uninstall everything and start again.
So, here's what I missed:
There are 80 assorted Mocap Examples in the presets folder.
Updated mel scripts that handle the creation of the "Effects Assets" menu.
Updated version of the Mayatomr plugin that allows rendering of compressed EXR files.
I also forgot to mention the "Craft Directors Studio" plugin support files which are installed to a location outside of the main maya install folder. (C:\Program Files (x86)\Craft Animations by default). You don't need to do anything with these. You just need to use the plugin manager to load the craftdirectorstudioadaptor_maya2011.5.mll. Do the same for the Substance.mll while you're there. (And ICEFlow.mll if you're lucky enough to have access to all that awesomeness too!)
If you don't see the "Effects Assets" menu in nDynamics, then you have to use the menu set customise UI to revert to the default nDynamics menus. This is explained in detail in the SAP release notes.
If I discover any other missing bits and pieces I'll update here.
Last week I downloaded and installed the "Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack". This is really just "Maya 2011 Service Pack 1" with a couple of extras thrown in to sweeten the deal for subscribers.
For some reason, so far unknown to me, the autodesk devs decided to distribute the subscription advantage pack as "2011.5" while continuing to call service pack 1 "2011". I'm pretty sure the code base for 2011.5 is the same as for 2011 - at least all the 3rd party plugins I've tried still load and behave correctly (and usually a version change requires a recompile of 3rd party plugins).
By default the subscription advantage pack gets installed to "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack". I know I could have redirected it to a more sensible and shorter path name, but I like to stick to defaults since they make some things more straight forward and less prone to human error (for example, deployment on a render farm).
The thing that really bothered me was the way my prefs folder would now have to be named "2011.5-x64". I know it's only a few extra characters, but it makes transporting prefs messy (for example, when I need to work on a system that does not have the SAP).
Ok, enough whinging. There's an easy solution. And it goes something like this. (more...)
