Effects & Animation Tutorials

Dual monitor craziness

2011-12-05T18:45:00.001-08:00

Crap my Outliner (or other window) is stuck on my 2nd monitor which I don't have right now?!

for ($window in `lsUI -windows`) { window -e -tlc 0 0 $window ; }

This line of code will push all maya windows onto the primary monitor's top-left corner.

How to Batch Render in Maya

2010-05-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

Crap This Non-manifold Geometry is Killing Me

2010-03-01T21:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a little trick I learned recently for finding all your n-gons and tris and other problem areas on your mesh.
So I created this random jacked up polygon and it's pretty obvious where the n-gon is... but just to illustrate how this works it's what we'll use.

So now we click on the Mesh - Cleanup... Which is also available on the SHIFT RIGHT CLICK marking menu when in object mode with a polygon selected.

If you set the options the way I shown in these images then you should get a face selection of just the bad faces that you need to fix. If none seem to be showing you can always hit the F key to focus the camera on the selection.

Note how the N-gon is now selected clearly showing me what needs to be fixed.
You can also attempt to let Maya fix it on it's own with the cleanup option instead of the selection option... but I've met a few girls named Maya... I wouldn't trust them to do it the way I like it.

How to Make Windows 7 Play Nice With Your Wacom

2009-12-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

Windows 7 has some nice features and as a whole so far I'm pretty thrilled with it. It does however start out with some pen tablet junk enabled by default that tends to conflict with the Wacom properties which will annoy any digital artist awful quickly. As I'm sure this will be something my students will be coming up to me asking about I've decided to jump ahead and write this up.
I had already dug around and discovered one set of menus in the Control Panel but it wasn't quite turning it all off until I googled the problem and found a reference to turning off the Wacom Virtual Hid Driver on a forum. Now everything seems to work beautifully.

UV Layout Texture

2009-07-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

This file is great to use when laying out UVs. An x co-worker from Perpetual gave it to me and explained that circles and text are two things that make the distortion from bad UVs quite obvious. So go ahead and download this file, map it onto your geometry and have a blast UV mapping! :P

2009-07-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

Since I absolutely go crazy trying to model without these set up as hotkeys and I'm constantly forgetting where I left the scripts set them up I decided to google them one last time and then post them on here mostly for myself as a quicker way to find them and paste them into the next workstation I have to set up. (but of course if you find them useful by all means take them.)

Toggle the X-Ray-command

// get last panel that recieved focus
string $panel = `getPanel -wf`;
// toggle xray mode
modelEditor -e -xray ( !`modelEditor -q -xray $panel` ) $panel;

Toggle the Grid

string $panel = `getPanel -wf`;
modelEditor -e -grid ( !`modelEditor -q -grid $panel` ) $panel;

Toggle Wireframe on Shaded

string $panel = `getPanel -wf`;
modelEditor -e -wos ( !`modelEditor -q -wos $panel` ) $panel;

Getting nice depth of field results from the Mentalray Physical Lens DOF node

2009-05-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

This is a quick render of some depth of field ceated with this techniqueTo begin we need to create a camera
Then in the attribute editor (with the camera selected press CTRL-A) we scroll down to the mentalray tab and open it. We then click the button next to lens shader to map a new shader to the attribute.
In the create render node dialog box that appears we scroll down to the lenses section and choose the Physical_lens_dof node.
Now we should have two new attributes in the channel control for the camera. The plane attribute is the distance from the camera at which the focal point is set to and should always be a negative number. The radus controls how deep or shallow the depth of field effect will be. If you're into photography then you can consider this similar to your aperture setting.
Now in order to make controlling the focus distance easier we're going to rig up a distance tool to the camera and link it's output value to the plane attribute of the lens shader. Go to create - measure tools - distance tool then click once near the camera and again somewhere else in the scene. For the sake of staying organized lets label one locator CameraLocator and the other CameraFocalPoint.
Now to hook it all together we're going to snap the CameraLocator onto the camera by holding the V key and using the move tool and then we'll parent the locator to the camera. That way now the distance tool will always reflect the value of the distance from the camera to the focal point regardless of any camera movements. Now we could leave well enough alone and just key the camera and focal point whenever we need an animated camera/focal point but why stop there when we can add another level of control? Now we'll take the Camera, CameraFocalPoint, and the Distance tool and group them. This gives us the ability to move the entire rig at the group level if we want the camera to move with the focus distance locked at a specific distance. Oh and don't forget to hit the insert key on the group level and snap the pivot of the group to the camera.
Now to automate the rig. Select the camera and the distance tool and graph them in the hypershade window (Yes I know you can use the hypergraph but I think it's ugly so I don't use it.)
Since we need a negative number as our input for the plane attribute we can't just hook directly from the distance tool into the physical_lens_dof node. So we're going to divert the values through a multiply/divide node with a negative value in it. Scroll through the create maya nodes bar on the left side of the hypershade until you find the multiply/divide node and bring one into your working window.
Now middle mouse drag the distance dimension tool node onto the multiply/divide node and click other on the dialog that pops up. When the connection editor appears scroll down the left side to click on distance and on the right side open up the input one and click on the input1x to make the connection.
Then middle mouse drag the multiply/divide node onto the physical_lens_dof node and again click the "other" option in the dialog box. When the connection editor pops up this time you need to hilight the outputX on the left side and the plane on the right side.
Now that we've made all the connections we need to insert the negative value on the multiply divide node. In some cases it may be necessary to multiply by a number other than one in order to set the value to match the scene scale. Double click the multiply/divide node to bring up the attribute editor for it. In the input 2 channel in the x field (the first little window) insert your negative value. (-1 in this case)
Now all thats left is to set up a scene and play with the radius setting to control how much blur you want from your setup. Oh but keep in mind that the more you crank up your radius setting the more you'll need to crank up your sampling in the render settings to avoid a grainy messy blur.

How Come I Don't See Mental Ray As An Option For Rendering?

2009-05-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Sounds like you need to enable the plugin. Open the Plugin Manager by going to Window - Settings/preferences - Plugin Manager. (As illustrated in this image.)

Then in the plugin manager make sure you have the Mayatomr.mll box checked on. You can also check the autoload box if you plan to render in Mentalray often and want it to load every time you start Maya.

Then to switch to rendering with Mentalray go to your render settings and pull down the render using pulldown and click the Mentalray switch.

Where Did My Skin Cluster Go?! (AKA Why Won't My Geometry Move With The Bones Anymore?)

2009-05-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

My first inclination is to ask: Have you deleted your history recently?
It seems that a lot of teachers love to tell students to delete their history as often as possible to save RAM and minimize possible errors and conflicts while modeling. While I agree with the sentiment and I use the "Delete All by Type History" command quite often, you should be aware that delete history will also wipe out your skin clusters or any other deformers in your scene.

Thankfully the geniuses who make Maya also recently provided us with the solution. If you have deformers in your scene that you'd like to remain intact then you need to choose the "Delete by Type NON-DEFORMER History" Which should clear up your history nicely (all except the bankruptcy you're going to go through before you finish paying for the school) without destroying your deformers. I've seen many people throw away hours and hours of weight painting work by accidentally deleting their history. Please use caution when deleting history and save plenty of iterations of your work.

OMG! Why won't my hotkeys work?!

2009-05-03T22:08:00.001-07:00

Question: Are you hitting your translate, rotate, or scale hotkeys and not getting the tools and maybe you've noticed that you're suddenly getting keys on your transforms?

Answer: Caps Lock is the devil.
Answer Elaborated: When your caps lock is toggled on it sets Maya into setting keys mode so if you hit the W key you're setting a key on the translate channels instead of switching to the translate gizmo. I have seen people tear out their hair for hours trying to figure out why nothing is working only to find out it's just their caps lock toggled on. (I may have even been one of those people.)

Solution: Turn off your caps lock. Simple as that. (You may also want to delete any random keys you set accidentally.)