For a while now we have been using a custom script to export and import skin weights but a recent project made it necessary to re-work the code because it was just too slow for more complex meshes. Of course the task of transferring skin weights is nothing new and there are a bunch of [...]
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 [...]
The color picker in Autodesk Maya still lacks the ability to properly choose colors respecting any linear workflow settings. A current workaround is to introduce a gamma node which can be quite tedious even though a couple of scripts out there can help with the work. But still it results in more nodes being brought [...]
This tutorial is about how to transfer a custom rig including animation from Autodesk Maya to a game engine such as Unity. The main problem for this process is that most of what makes up a character rig, such as controls, constraints, connections, expressions will not always get properly imported into the game engine. One [...]
This rigging series for maya is the summary of my rigging lectures at the school I am teaching. I found that complicated workflows such as rigging can be never slow enough when doing it in the classroom. Especially the basics of rigging can be overwhelming for inexperienced users and so I thought I’d put together [...]
Linear workflow has already taken its place in our every day work and not too long ago it was a concept that was somewhat clear but also a bit fuzzy to implement in projects at that time. But as the current tools have a much better implementation of linear workflow making the process a lot [...]
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 [...]