Tip # 272 - resetting pan zoom

A lot of people don't even like Maya's pan/zoom tool in the first place, I often recommend to shut it off in the camera settings.






















this also allows you to do have two panels up of the same camera, and see a green square around the area you are "zoomed" into, which can be helpful.

However, someone recently asked "How do I reset the pan/zoom "
which I realized i had no idea, so I looked it up.




its under the attribute Editor of the camera,
open the tab for Display Options ,
and then open the tab under that for 2D Pan/Zoom


if you set the Pan to 0 0 and the zoom to 1 it will go back to its default , or no pan and no zoom.

this is something that may come in handy as a script, so.....

here is a little mel snippet you can paste on your shelf..


{

string $panel = `getPanel -wf`;

string $camera = `modelEditor -q -cam $panel`;

setAttr ($camera + ".horizontalPan") 0;

setAttr ($camera + ".verticalPan") 0;

setAttr ($camera + ".zoom") 1;

}

//-----------end --------------

better turning particles...

I havn't tried this yet,, but it looks interesting....







this code was suggested by Eric Cloutier on cgtalk to make better turning particles. ive added a simple adjustment dividing the turn by the goalPP. the results are pretty acceptable. i think i see flipping occassionaly but not too much

the suggested code is listed here

forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7186073#post7186073

and repeated here for reference with my adjustement....466 is my maxCount of particles which im using to get a percentage value for goalPP



creation:
nParticleShape1.customAim = ; //or whatever
nParticleShape1.goalPP=nParticleShape1.particleId/466+.4;

after dynamics:
float $maxTurn = 0.1;
vector $curAim = nParticleShape1.customAim;
vector $vel = nParticleShape1.velocity;
vector $newAim = ;
nParticleShape1.customAim = $newAim/nParticleShape1.goalPP;