With the release of Maya 2014 the Modeling Toolkit (MTK) has been introduced to improve the modeling workflow, formerly known as the NEX plugin. The integration works pretty well even though it still feels like a plugin here and there. This is mostly due to the fact that the user can enable it if needed [...]
While working on the Maya plugins iDisplace and iCollide I came across the idea for additional deformers. The maya bonus tools 2013 comes with the slide components tool, which allows to slide components over a surface during the modeling process while maintaining the shape (thanks to Steven Roselle for his awesome work). So the idea [...]
For quite some time I have been looking for a simple collision effect that could be used as a deformer. Unfortunately Maya doesn’t provide such a deformer without having to use soft bodies, nCloth nodes or muscle objects. The problem is that all these solutions are somewhat simulation based and time dependent and are maybe [...]
NEW VERSION! Just recently I was again in the need for a displacement deformer, but since Maya lacks such a basic deformer in it’s toolset I planned to use the great DisplaceD deformer, available on creativeCrash. Unfortunately the plugin doesn’t support Maya 2013, even though we are already halfway to Maya 2014. Since I needed [...]
Finally it’s time to release the new version to the public. I am very excited about the new features and all in all QTown has grown to a pretty nice and convenient tool to generate some midground to background cities*. Initially intended to create only some greeble-like structures to populate the scene and make simple [...]
There is a small issue with deleting display layers in Maya that have already objects assigned to them. Usually when you add objects to a display layer the drawing overrides are turned on to be controlled by the display layer. The bugging part is, when you delete the layer the drawing override will remain being [...]
Ok, everyone. This is really exciting as I finally managed to include some automatic UV texturing into my QTown script. I wanted to do this from the beginning but after I was done with the first version there was not enough brain left to think about how to texture the resulting geometry. But eventually I [...]
Alright, time for another script that I wrote recently to help me during some productions. It’s for distributing objects across a surface and yes, I am aware of the fact that there are already some (and quite useful) scripts available. But everything I tried didn’t give the expected results, no matter how the process worked. [...]
I wrote this script a while ago and made it available through creativeCrash.com but I thought that it would be also nice to put it here. This is a little tool to simplify the creation of a background city. It’s initial idea is based on the very handy 3ds max plugin ‘Greeble’ but more aiming [...]
Just recently, while cleaning up a CAD model and remodeling parts, I noticed how cumbersome it is in Maya to move the current component selection along a specific axis, especially then the geometry needs to be extended. Though Maya has some nice tools to set the specific axis the way to get there can be [...]