Anim Bizz

bhGhost Yes! How cool is this! I haven't used Maya's ghosting in a while and was searching for a way to ghost a whole character and Bamm! bhGhost. Create a selection set of all your character's geo and load it into the bhGhost GUI. Hit "ghost" and it draws you up an outline on that frame. Heaps of control over the outline in the bhGhost node. It's also very fast with no slow down. Here's the link to the mel script. Big thumbs up to Brian Horgan for this one. http://www.graphite9.com/MayaDownloads.html

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/dpautorigsystem I've used some sweet auto riggers but this one really impresses me. I managed to rig up a simple skeleton character in about an hour - skinned and all. Very user friendly system based on mirrored guides, rig set up and a super fast skinning GUI. Dig the rig too. Comes with all the treats, stretchy IK, finger set drivens, world head rots etc etc etc

VRAY DOME HDRI Super technique for pushing HDRI maps through a dome light and getting the hdri highlights nice and hot. By default, they come in with a washy contrast that forces you to add extra lights. Add the gamma attribute to your file textures and render up some sweetness. http://www.cgskies.com/resources_tutorial_rendering.php

Select constrained to object Ever worked in a complex scene created by someone else with all kinds of constraints and nested constrained objects? Nightmare finding what object is constrained to what? This python script will select the object that your object is constrained to. Sweet. Map to a button - done. import maya. cmds as mc selection = mc. ls ( sl= 1 ) toSelect = [ ] for item in selection: constraint = mc. listConnections ( item+ '.parentInverseMatrix[0]' , d= 1 , s= 0 , type = 'constraint' ) if constraint: constraint = constraint [ 0 ] src = mc. listConnections ( constraint+ '.target[0].targetParentMatrix' , d= 0 , s= 1 ) if src: toSelect. extend ( src ) try : mc. select ( toSelect ) except : pass

COOL!! Every studio that I've been at has some sort of "match object A to B" tool that simply snaps A to B. I thought it was some sort of wizardry (and a shame on Maya for not having that tool). Then I heard about the point/orient constraint create then delete method. Well the magic trick has been unveiled.... All you need to do is create a delete `parentConstraint`; button on your shelf and that's you A/B matcher. select object 1, shift select object 2 run your delete `parentConstraint`; and boom it does the whole thing for you. Love the simplicity.

CAMMY After being assigned some camera work where the job was to create realistic noise, zooms, booms and pans I realized that camera work is not as easy as I thought. After some gimble, frustrating noise controller rigging and battles with subtlelty I thought I'd rig up a clean camera rig to make things easier. If you're doing camera work, feel free to grab my rig over at Creativecrash.com http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/cammy ****UPDATE*** Now with aim locator http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/cammy-v2--2 *to attach your own camera, just parent constrain your camera to the Cammy camera or just parent your camera under the camera2_Shake locator,

setAttr on multiple attributes 1 hour burn trying to figure out how to set the 'relative' attribute on or off on multiple clusters. Maya still doesn't allow multiple selection of clusters and attribute setting nor is relative available in the attribute spreadsheet. { string $nodes[] = `ls -long -type "cluster" `; for($node in $nodes) { print($node + "n"); setAttr ($node + ".relative") 0; } }

V-RAY TEXTURE LIBRARY + PRESETS Nice. Someone put together a 3dsmax-like shader library. Download the DeeX shader library and copy it into the Sunday Pipeline directory warehouse browser. Sweet. DeeX shaders http://deex.info/wordpress2/2011/08/deex-vray-shader/ Sunday Pipeline Plugin http://www.3dg.dk/2011/08/12/sunday-pipeline-maya-public/

Looks pretty sweet -  UVAUTORATIO  PRO I haven't tried this texture plugin yet but it is looking awesome for uv texturing. http://www.renderheads.com/portfolio/UVAutoRatio/

Flicker Free animation VRAY for Maya The tough thing about Vray is that for the most part it's default render settings are most set up for interior still frames or arch-viz camera fly throughs. When you want objects moving through the scene, Vray's irradience maps are calculated differently each frame....which leads to flickering GI. I've found a great tutorial that explains the irradiance map prepass method, which works similar to motion blur pre and post frame calculation. What it seems to do is pre-calculate the GI maps then blend them + or - X amount of frames so that flickering is eliminated. It's a two step process, but way faster than brute force GI methods. http://www.workshop.mintviz.com/tutorials/flicker-free-animation-using-vray/

VrayForMaya Nederhorst Settings Here's some pretty decent vray settings for animation. There's so many things to play with in the render settings - it can get out of hand. According to this video, the Nederhost settings attempt to keep all of your quality control in the Adaptive DMC section. I can dig it. **Great tip from the video. Switch to Fixed rate rather than adaptive DMC with a low sample rate for fast test renders. I have to render layers set up. One with DMC, one with Fixed for fast render quality switching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZURdN48My9I

Pose 2 Shelf Gotta give props to simple, good scripts. I was posing out some wing shapes on a character and I was looking for a simple pose storing script. Here it is. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/pose-2-shelf Simply select your controls, name your pose and BAMM it saves the pose as a button to your shelf. Gotta like that stuff.

V-RAY for MAYA shader library Yes! For you people out there who use Vray, I highly recommend you grab this shader library tool by Oliver Markowski. It comes with a shwack of presets, a test sphere file that you can create and export your own shaders and a very cool GUI for Maya. It's a bit of work to install and NOTE: you have to convert all of your .jpg preview files to .png files for them to be viewable in the GUI. But when it's up and running - this is a great tool for shader organization.

Constraint Burn + Extrude along face normal burn Did I miss something on an update or have I just done too many bad things to my brain lately? I always used to use the 1W0 attribute to animate a constraint on and off. Now it seems there is a Blend Point 1 attribute that does the job. When you create a constraint this is added in your channel box right after visibility. Anyway, had me going in circles for a bit. And another one! Making even indents or extrudes on objects...not so intuitive in Maya. I needed to make the indents on a mouse button and after my extrude I was looking for all types of settings on the move tool. The 'normals' only works on nurbs and verts. To move faces inward or outwards along normals you need to use the edit mesh/transform components tool. Jeez.

THE ZEN Ahhh Maya transfer attributes...why oh why do you add a history node to the stack when transferring. I had a situation where I needed to match the vertex positions of one object to another. The problem is that it adds a non-deletable node to the target's history. If you delete it, the tweak reverts. Lame. Why can't it just query the vertex position of the base object and copy those values to the target verts?  Well thankfully there's a script that does just that. It the ZEN yo! http://dissentgraphics.com/tools/zentools/ There are a big shwack of scripts in this suite but the tool I am talking about is in the mel folder. It's called  doZenTransferPointPositions.mel Select your base object and your target verts and run it. SNAP. Vert positions copied.

Yea! Here is a sweet script that allows you to execute, source and edit scripts all within one window. I can't say how annoying it is to have to source a script then type it into the MEL line. This script is UI genius. Check it!

Automation automation....au-to-mation I've been out of the rigging loop for a while but man there are some sweet new tools. Anzovin's The Setup Machine 2 is pretty damn sweet. But here's a niiiice reverse foot setup script that puts in all of your toe roll, heel roll etc etc automatically. Gotta dig it! The script is over at Creative Crash but here's a video showing it's slickness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIDLIY5Ls5o

1 Button stretchy IK Man I'm a sucker for 1 button anything. Check out this script that once you've built your spline IK....select the IK handle, press the button via this script and yes - super stretchy IK. Lov it. Stretchy IK over at Creativecrash

Lovin' VRAY for Maya's VRAY Blend material Sometimes the most simple things tweak my brain. I remember the pain of having to use mix8 nodes in Mental Ray. This mucho bettero. 1. slap down a vray blend MTL. 2. Throw a semi transparent shader in as your base. 3. add in another shader with a blend amount or use a texture to determine blend amounts. That's it. Insta-layered shader. Awesome.

GOODBYE MENTAL RAY! After going over digital tutor's introduction to vray for maya, I'm pretty convinced that it's far better than MR. With GI, motion blur, caustics, blurry relflections all on - I can still get decent render quality and times....on my laptop. I recommend this Digital Tutor tut if you are thinking of dropping into VRAY. http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=431