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...)
The image above shows the Render Elements tab in the vray render settings window. If you've used it before you may notice some cosmetic differences, and that's because I've modified one of the vray mel scripts to add some functionality that makes render elements easier to use with render layers.
(more...)
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.
update: 9 April 2011: maya 2012-x64 version also available
update: added 2013-x64 version
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.
