VP 2.0 (shaded mode) pushes objects

I still don't really use VP2.0 for the little things that drive you crazy, and this is one of them.

if you are in shaded mode in VP2.0 , for some reason, it pushes those objects in front of the grid in the ortho views.

 luckily this doesn't happen in "legacy" view.

( thanks Alex for reporting the issue )

Cheerios : Jackpot.

Cheerios Jackpot from CHRLX on Vimeo.

Lead Character TD / pipline TD

Pay Day Standing tall

PayDay Standing tall from smann on Vimeo.


I was responsible for all the rigging and deformation controls.  For this version we had to kick it up a notch in all departments as the clients wanted as close to reality that they could get.    Numerous reference was taken of scrunched wrappers, various salt levels , stretched caramel, and various lighting scenarios.


My biggest challenge for me was the wrapper scrunching. Since all the assets were actually from our previous pay day commercials, there was a bit of salvage and recovery to keep things on time and budget, but also everything had to be upgraded.  The caramel geo and wrapper geo was double rez compared to previous, along with all the textures getting make overs.  For the salt , the amount and poly count was probably close to tripled.


Salt: 
  originally the salt was created as physical geometry , and although we could actually use it and push it through the pipeline, it really bogged everything down. There was a lot of debate about salt scale, placement, and amount, so I wrote a few tools for loading and affecting the salt for the anm/lgt team.I created a mirror rig of the caramel bar with salt and peanuts that could be used just to adjust the look of the salt.

 Once the salt levels were decided upon, we employed arnold asset files. Other than some weird interaction quirks they worked extremely well, and not only sped up rendering tremendously, but interaction speed in Maya was completely restored.  ( as long as you kept them in bounding box view)

---

Caramel:

 Other than doubling the poly count and resculpting the divots in the caramel, the process for the caramel was fairly similar to the previous jobs.  The divots this time were a progressive blend shape that the animator could draw on as the peanuts hit the bar. I had to make these twice so the broken half bars matched the full unbroken bar.  There was also a small curl that came off the front edges of the broken bar that had a simple joint rig to grow and animate it. 

wrapper:

 The wrapper got the most attention for this upgrade. The most important part was getting the wrapper to look like it wasn't stretching but scrunching and folding without distorting the textures too much.  I gave the animator a simple scrunch rig based on the original lower res geo, and then used that as a base to create the progressive blend shapes of the scrunch. To get better creasing and control over the wrapped I kicked the shapes into mudbox and back to maya to iterate through the shapes.   The connection to mudbox was great as I had already created the progressive blend in maya, but could just "send to Mudbox"  a target shape, sculpt it , then "send to Maya" and it just fell into place and the blend still worked and was updated.  This was great as I could quickly make changes and see if they worked or not and make sure the movement flowed correctly. 

This technique was especially helpful for the end position of the wrapper as it fell and hit the ground. The client wanted the wrapper to maintain rigid in its shape with folds and creases.  The animators rig was joint driven and looked like a spinal column with ribs( or ladder )  so they could tweak and bend the wrapper into a number of shapes, but it didn't have too much in the way of creasing.   I took the final position from the animation and sent it to mudbox and sculpted a shape that worked well enough, and then brought it back into the rig to augment the joints in finding the final position. I used bspirit.mel to convert the sculpt to the target shape that could be injected before the joints.   So the joint rig and blend shape could be used in conjunction.

 well, that's it..   Just a little bit into the inner workings of Pay day "standing tall" 

-=s

What's new and missing in MAYA 2015: keep faces together on extrude

So I can't really say why there is so much removed and moved in Maya 2015 but I can shed some light on how to get some of your options back.

 For 2015 the "keep faces together" radio button has been removed from the top of the polygon menus.Also, the extrude tool listed is the one for the modeling tool kit, not the original Maya extrude.

and for those of you don't want to commit to the modeling tool kit, this can be a bit of a pain.

 

You need to access the old extrude tool via the shift LMB over your geo marking menu. ( down for extrude Face)

 There is also no option in the extrude tools option box, which I'm gonna flag as a bug.

So you can just do you're extrude and then edit the extrude node in the channel box ( orange arrow below ), or you can use shift + cntrl + RMB and get the extrude options marking menu and "toggle keep faces together" Personally I  would rather this was "turn on, or turn off" as toggling assumes you already know the current state.  

I'm currently hunting down the env to set the default on this. ( for me its ON by default ) which I like.but from what I understand this is not true for everyone. 

update:   

 running "togglePolyMoveComponents" will toggle the actual ENV . so if you are currrently ON by default it will make it off by default, and OFF to ON . 

CHRLX 2014 reel

The latest REEL edit for CHRLX


CHRLX Reel 2014 from CHRLX on Vimeo.


 I'm responsible for the character rigging.

Overriding Maya's duplicate defaults for better stability

Everything in Maya is basically name based. Move the sphere named "ball" over by 24 units etc.

Amazingly you can break a lot of simplicity of Maya by simply having 2 objects named the same thing.
In the following, if you were to type "select ball" Maya will return an error: or "setAttr ball.ty 100;" or basically any command that doesn't use the full path of the object. which is very common.( in Maya default and in many online scripts)

// Error: line 1: More than one object matches name: ball
 "group1| ball"  & "group2|ball"

Obviously this is not ideal.
In my experience I've found it is just easier to give every node in Maya a unique name and avoid name clashing as much as possible.

 However. The duplicate and duplicate with transform in Maya no longer has any options that you can customize, and by default is not set to rename children.

so if you duplicate "group2|ball" you will get "group3|ball"   as it only cares about objects in the same parent space.

I'm not exactly why it was decided to remove the options for duplicate and duplicate with transform , but I'm not a fan.

So I hijack the scripts and put them in my prefs/scripts/ directory and let it ignore the embedded Maya commands.

for Duplicate do a "whatIs performDuplicate.mel" and copy paste that script into your prefs dir.
then edit that script with the info below

//___________performDuplicate.mel____________________________

find the line that says :
int $renameChild = 0;
and replace the 0 with a 1
int $renameChild = 1;



for Duplicate with Transforms its a little easier, as it just uses the duplicate command , so you can add the following as a script in your prefs/scripts/ dir.


//___________DuplicateWithTransforms.mel____________________________
global proc DuplicateWithTransform ()
{
evalEcho("duplicate -rc -smartTransform")
}

the nice thing is, Duplicate Special still has an option box (for now) so if you want to duplicate a bunch of objects and retain non-unique child names, you can.

hope this helps

-=s

Smann's Toolbox Shelf for Maya

Okay, I hate the toolbox, I think it's a waste of space. So I started tinkering around with adding a shelf to it to make it more useful. 

 I've got everything working, now I'm just gonna try it out in production and see how it all holds up.

Right Now I'm over writing Maya's internal toobox,mel by putting mine in the prefs/scripts folder, but I think eventually I'd like to do it like addSideShelf.mel and have it just add to the toolbox rather than override.. but first I have to see how well this idea even works.

also, right now I only made 1 possible shelf available.. maybe down the line I'll add tabs.  but at some point the internal maya commend "shelfLayout" lost its ability to be vertical.