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[Maya/FBX] Unrecognized File Type
If you see this error, one solution is to go to the plug-in manager (Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager) and make sure that the FBX plug-in is loaded.
Source: r2eng – AREA Forums
00[Maya] Script: Automatic Project Path Setter
After getting tired of manually setting project paths for files that were already open, I made a simple script that does exactly that and then prompts you to reopen the file so assets from relative paths load correctly:
00[Maya] Poor Windows mental ray Performance
I got a PM on CGSociety about mental ray performance on Windows and I thought I’d post it here since it’s obviously of interest to Maya users. Here it is:
I found this thread of yours [talking about mental ray in Windows performance vs. Mac OS X and Linux]:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-1058847.html
I’m wondering if you were able to do anything to bring Win 7 mr rendering performance up to par with osx/linux?
Basically, my studio has just built some new 24 core xeon e5 machines to replace our mac pros. By all other benchmarks these machines should be and are faster than our old mac pros, except mr rendering performance, which is actually worse.
Our farm currently uses maya 2012 sp1.
any ideas would be appreciated, thanks.
Here’s my response:
Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do except switch those machines to Linux. It’s not an OS or application-level problem – it’s with the compiler used to build mental ray on Windows (MSVC) vs. the one used on OS X and Linux (gcc). I know that Autodesk is looking into it but I don’t think you’ll see this change any time soon, unfortunately.
00[Maya] Tips on Efficiently Building and Texturing Terrains
So, I’m relatively new to the world of organic world building. I’m mostly experienced in illustration in the product-visualization vein but I’m getting into more fully-fleshed scenery and I’ve been investigating some options like Vue, Terragen, etc. But, I like to keep things in Maya if possible, so I’m going to post some helpful tips and things I’ve learned from other tutorials, along with my own texturing workflow.
I’m using the awesome iDisplace with a crater texture to build a basic height terrain to shape out some hills with a naturally-looking fractal mapping. The nice thing about doing it procedurally with iDisplace is that you can use textures and blend them or add them with texture utilities and you can increase your plane mesh resolution any time and it will propagate through the node chain nondestructively. The next thing I do is map a ramp along the vertical with a projection node:
00[Maya] Fixing the Hypershade Create Panel in 2012
This bug has been fixed for Maya 2013.
In the current version of Maya 2012, even with the Hotfix 1 applied, the Hypershade tends to have it’s own mind and likes to ignore any custom set width of the create panel. Any time the Hypershade is opened the create panel presents it’s full beauty by occupying more than half of the entire Hypershade window.
The error can be tracked down to the single fact that the internally stored width of the window, that is set when the window is closed, is not read back properly and leads to a wrong calculation of the window size and it’s contained panels. The assumption is that the actual drawing of the window and the setting of the size based on the preferences is happening in the wrong order, leading to the faulty behavior.
Nevertheless, the problem can be solved by making the particular script read the stored window preferences in the user settings folder, rather than the system variable.
The script responsible for creating and drawing the Hypershade is “hyperShadePanel.mel” in the “scripts/others” directory of the Maya.
The following line needs to be edited (at the end of the script; inside the “setHyperShadeCreateBarPaneSize” procedure)
int $paneLayoutWidth = `paneLayout -q -width $hyperShadePaneLayout`;
and replaced with the following code:
int $paneLayoutWidth = `windowPref -q -width hyperShadePanel1Window`;
You can download the modified script here: hyperShadePanel.mel
Place it in one of the user script directories that Maya will scan during startup. This way the original script stays in place (just for safety reasons) but the copy will still get evaluated after all scripts in the application folder.
Source: brave rabbit
00[Maya] Hypershade Crashes Program (Workaround)
Sometimes when working in Maya, opening the HyperShade window causes Maya to crash. Here’s how to fit it, at least temporarily.
Solution:
Before loading Hypershade or making any MR node enter this:
renderThumbnailUpdate false;This will disable the thumbnails that update as you edit attributes. Sure other materials wont update as well, but at least Maya wont crash and you can see changes made in the renderView directly. Not a complete solution but its a workaround.
Source: BlurFrame – AREA Autodesk
00[General] 15 Tips for 3D Photorealism
Fool the eye and wow your viewers with 15 top tips on creating photorealistic 3D images.
Model from references
“The best criteria [when sourcing references] is the resolution of photos. It is very important to see the details of an object in the photo…that way you don’t waste your time trying to understand it.”
Denis Lebedev
“I like to have at least one side view and a three-quarter view. Even better would be if you had access to the real objects themselves, to either take pictures of or have next to you while modelling.”
Emre Salihov
00[Maya] Mixing Displacement Maps in Any Renderer
Someone on CGSociety asked how to mix displacement maps in Maya, so I figured I’d give him some tips and make a blog post out of it, since I’ve seen this asked a few times in the past. This process works for all renderers since it uses Maya’s utilities, nothing specific to V-Ray or mental ray. Instead of doing it with blend materials or something like that, it’s all done by connecting your greyscale textures to a Plus/Minus/Average utility and sending the output from that to the Displacement slot of your Shading Network:
00[Softimage XSI] Different Types of Objects
There are several different types of objects found in a Softimage scene. While you don’t model or render all of them, they all have specific purposes.
Geometric Objects
Geometric objects are objects that have points (geometry) and can be modeled and rendered. There are several different types of geometric objects in Softimage.
Nulls
Nulls are simply locations in space that cannot be modeled or rendered. However, they have many uses, such as for setting constraints and organizing objects in hierarchies. Nulls are sometimes called locators or point objects.
The position of a null is represented by this icon.
Implicit Objects
Implicits are basic shapes defined by a mathematical formula. By themselves, they are not renderable but can be used, for example, to define bounding boxes when setting weights for envelopes, or as control objects for a character rig. Implicit objects are sometimes called helper objects or dummies.
You can scale, rotate, and translate implicit objects, but you cannot deform them because they have no points.
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