What the man behind the curtain is up to.

Fighting the urge to be unproductive, I locked myself in the house for the past few days to get some work done on a new character TD demo.  Been under the weather anyhow and didn’t feel like doing much else, not even surf *gasp!*.  Here it is in all it’s beautiful animator friendly simplicity.  I plan on extending this demo with character animation tools.  I can’t wait to get away from creating demos and rendering video and go back to actually programming and rigging stuff!  I have so much more advanced rigging techniques to show and some that haven’t gotten to a finished stage on my characters yet so stay tuned.

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I took the VRay shader library from what Oliver Markowski, creator of Full Blown Images, compiled and married it with the shader warehouse resources provided by Sunday Pipeline, took out this and that, renamed, dusted off, and reorganized everything.  All assets were renamed according to strict naming convention to minimize confusion and to facilitate faster searching.  All this on my free time, which I’ve had quite a lot the past few days.  Well, go ahead and grab it because it’s quite a library to have in your arsenal.  It’s all free to use.

Sunday Pipeline is the way to go.  If you haven’t installed it yet, head over there, read up on it, and give it a try.  They are updating it with new scripts often.  It’s a simplified asset manager that houses everything from shaders to geometry to a script repo, and best of all, programmed in Python.

I’ll be updating this .rar from time to time now with VRay shaders from the internet and what I create or use on my own.

Sunday Pipeline Warehouse hosted by CGHijinks

All links in this post

Browser for the Asset Library

Add and Remove Assets

Create/Customize/Get Crazy!

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From Director/Animator Alex Curtis comes his debut animated short that I luckily got to work on as a freelance pro bono character rigger/td.  Here’s a work in progress reel and Kaylee the character I rigged and supervised rigging the hair and goggles with the help of my friend Suchan.  Keep in mind this demo is months old at this point and a newer one is out that is password protected so I cannot share until later.

Kaylee showin' off her moves

Stay tuned!  The final is looking good!  Should be any day now…

 

Suchan, a buddy from Nepal, just broke the independent game dev facial performance capture animation barrier.  He deserves kudos for getting it to this stage.  This would be such a valuable asset to any gaming company if he brings it to the next level or even at this stage I suspect.  Suchan is on a solo climb of Mount Mocap and while he is a base camp right now, I expect he could make the difficult summit by himself!    Nice job!

I wonder how much harder it would be to actually be able to do facial mocap from your smart phone directly to a character in Maya or Unity app without any markers, to me that’s Everest.  It is, however, a tangible goal these days for developers and all the freely available mocap tech that’s on the market these days.

 

This demo illustrates the steps taken to develop a character from concept sketches to finished facial rig in a simplified format. This is an actual rig I developed with the use of proprietary rigging tools in Maya utilized daily at work so I’m not going to demo those tools. However, future installments will incorporate the use of tools that I have written and that you can use to aide the building of complex facial rigs such as this, and include overviews of more advanced rigging techniques. I would also like to break the process down into chunks to really go into more detail about things you should be thinking about if you are trying to rig a face. This is an ongoing process so stay tuned, I have lot’s of useful tips to share.

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Find Out How to Turn Custom Text to Realistic Metallic Objects

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What do you do when you screw up and delete all your history and input code in Maya script editor usually do to a right-click muscle memory FAIL?  First of all, DON’T close Maya!  Navigate to your prefs directory, depending on the system you’re using that is in different locations, and then open up the handy little mel file called “commandExecuter”, and that file name may have a hyphen and some numbers behind it depending on how many tabs you have going.  Open the corresponding file based on the tab you mistakenly erased in notepad or favorite text editor and then copy the contents back into your script editor.

This won’t get you everything back however, sad, I know, but if you can get back to where you were before the melt-down without too much hassle this way then that’s better than nothing.  That’s why I like using external IDE’s for longer coding sessions and the script editor for little things that make my life easier in the particular scene I’m working on.

 

Use windows clipboard data in your Maya Python scripts or other generic python.

Dependencies:
setuptools – You should have setuptools installed.
pip – If you have setuptools and/or use easy_install switch to pip by using easy_install to download and install pip, you won’t be sorry.  Pip is awesome, setuptools sux.
pyWin32 – Use pip to download pyWin32 from the commandline using pip install pyWin32.  Copy the installation to your Maya site-packages folder including any .pth, .txt, or .egg-info files.  Tip:  open .pth files in a text editor of choice and check out where pip’s libs are.

'''
based on mel script found here: http://bit.ly/e4qdyH
'''
import win32clipboard

def getClipboardData():
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 d = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData( win32clipboard.CF_TEXT )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
 return d
getClipboardData()

def putClipboardData(text):
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
 win32clipboard.SetClipboardText( text )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
t= 'test text'
putClipboardData(t)

This is based on what I found on teacup’s techy art stuff, written a while ago. I though it deserved an update, plus I needed it for something specific. It is a really handy module to have in your repertoire.  I posted these in a hurry so you probably need to add in some checks to make sure the datatype you are trying to retrieve is text only or else you’ll get errors.

PyQt and Qt obviously are way more powerful for getting other types of data including pixmap and slew of others.  This is simplified for a specific purpose.  Maybe soon I will be able to post a Qt version including drag and drop functionality.

 

Here’s a script I wrote for adding sub-directories of paths I’ve already added to the sys.path in my userSetup.py.

I’m just starting to code seriously in python and it seems like just getting everything to work right in Maya without a lot of fuss is pretty daunting for a beginner with little outside help except for the internet and a couple books.

As my Script Repo develops over time, I don’t want to have to keep worrying about PYTHONPATH having everything in it so I tell it where the root directories are and this script does the rest.

Hope somebody finds this helpful!

import sys
from os import walk
path = ja_python_paths
for p in path:
 for root, dirs, files in walk(p):
 if p is not root:
 sys.path.append(root)

#You can add an optional print statement at the end
#to see what it's doing...

if p is not root:
 print 'adding', root, 'to sys.path'
 sys.path.append(root)

 

Lately, I’ve been working on learning how to develop PyQt UI tools with Maya. Since I work with Maya 2009 daily, I have had to do quite a lot of digging to find out how things were implemented smoothly for it to work with that version. Hopefully, this makes it easier to understand and appreciate it in 2011 and *gasp* :-O 2012, where PyQt is fully integrated! Anyway, if you are in the same predicament, then I should be able to help, send comments and emails my way.