Anim Bizz

CORE RELEASE For all you home, 1 machine render monkeys out there. I just discovered how to drop some core processing power (if you have a multi-core computer) while you are rendering so you can do all that web surfing while your machine chugs. CTRL-ALT-DEL into your task manager. Find the Maya process, right click on it and select set affinity. Click off one of procs. Cool, never knew about that one.

SEQUENCE RENAMER Nice and simple free app to rename those image sequences that you buffooned in your render settings. It's through creative crash so you need to register. sequence 911 click here.

MENTAL RAY BOKEH LENS BASICS http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=189

FLUID CLOUD TUTORIAL http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-149.htm?PHPSESSID=7b58e42ebb2f6224c65dbf0481c1852f

V-RAY FOR MAYA BASICS Simple start for the V Ray renderer plugin. http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorials/vray-for-maya

USING NCLOTH TO DRIVE YOUR HAIR OR SPLINE IK I came across a VERY cool technique to drive Maya's hair or splineIK. I saw a post online and the guy said "create strips of polys from your hair, apply nCloth to them then wrap the hair to the nCloth" I said "huh"? So basically here's what he means... Let's say you need a dynamically driven IK handle that you would normally drive with a dynamic curve (say a pony tail or an antennae). Instead 1. Loft 2 curves together and create a poly 'ribbon'. 2. Create nCloth of your poly loft. 3. Take 1 of the curves and wrap deform it to the polys which are now nCloth. 4. Your curve is now driven by the movement of the nCloth which is MUCH more versatile and has way better collision detection. 5. Now you can set up joints and spline IK your nClothed curve to them...all of this being driven by your nCloth. 6. Set up your nCloth constraints which are very good and predictable. Adjust your ncloth movement as you need...

SHOT 30FPS AND NEED IT AT 24FPS? EDIT: WOW even a better technique... http://www.videocopilot.net/preset/frame_rate_converter/ Here's a cool tutorial on a quick and dirty way to convert 30i footage to 24fps in After Effects. http://blog.jrnielsen.com/2009/05/convert-30i-footage-to-24p-with-after-effects/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxdTbZngslE