Maya Station

Autodesk Media & Entertainment Virtual Conference

Autodesk is hosting a free virtual conference on 30th September.
Registration is required.

Morning Sessions:

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Styling and Simulation used on the characters in Sony Pictures Animation's upcoming feature film

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Bling Imaging discusses How to Speed up the Pipeline through Compositor Friendly Workflows for Maya

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Ubisoft discusses Prince of Persia: Bringing Elika to Life .

Afternoon Sessions:

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Autodesk Maya 2010: New Features & Introducing Maya Compositing

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Autodesk 3ds Max 2010: New Features

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Autodesk Softimage 2010: New Features & Introducing Face Robot Tool Set

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Grading and VFX Concurrent Workflow featuring Autodesk Lustre, Flame, and Smoke

* All times listed are Pacific Daylight Time

http://med.experience.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/en-US/all/index.php?i=1016&ch=EM

HotKey Editor – Editing the default hotkey in Toxik

These videos explain how to customize the default hot keys within Toxik.
Video by Ken LaRue, Autodesk Application Engineer

http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/hotkey_editor_editing_the_default_hotkey_in_toxik

GDC MasterClass: Taking the Horror out of Monster Rigging

This session is designed for beginning to intermediate Maya users familiar with Maya workflow and interface, as well as character rigging. Familiarity with Maya IK systems and joint creation would be helpful but not necessary

http://area.autodesk.com/inhouse/videos/gdc_masterclass_taking_the_horror_out_of_monster_rigging

Maya Composite network render

If you want to do a Maya Composite network render on multiple machines, you do not need to have the other machines licensed.   This is similar to Backburner and Maya Software render. 

How to suppress the FBX UI when you're scripting.

I see many people asking this : I'm writing a script and I want to prevent the FBX UI from popping up each time a file is imported. How do I do this?

Well, the answer is remarkably simple (I found out today)....since the 2009.0 version of the FBX plugin, the UI is automatically suppressed when you import a file using the command:

FBXImport -file "c:/myfile.fbx";

Read about those FBX MEL commands in the Autodesk FBX Help section (listed in the Maya Help menu).

Owen

Wee Typo in the Maya 2010 Visual Studio Compiler Version :(

I just got back from San Francisco and I always, always make the same mistake when I pack going there, I think San Francisco equals California which equals  sunny hot weather, needless to say I did not bring enough sweaters L

As the blog title indicates there is wee typo in the Maya 2010 Visual Studio compiler version, we say 2005 SP1 and what we really mean to say is 2008 SP 1 on Windows,

Sorry for any problems this has caused you,

Regards,

Kristine

Rendering for print

When using mental ray to render  a large image 6k x 6k for example, one often runs into a memory allocation issue and the render stops.
In this tutorial we will look into how to cut the render into segments without having a visible seam between the rendered tiles

There are 2 main steps to look at

1-   Tile command line rendering

2-   Final gather map

1-    Tile Command line rendering

Example: rendering 500*800 resolution
render -r mr -reg 0 250 0 400 -im tile01 myFile.ma

The region flag “-reg” will render a small portion of the image defined by the pixel numbers (X-Y)
The image flag “- im” will output a specific name defined by the user

However when using this method while rendering with Final gather, the result might not be acceptable due to the visible lines between the tiles.

1-    Final gather maps

Rendering the final gather map will fix the tiling problem.
We start by doing the following

 

In the metnal ray render settings > Final Gathering section. Provide a name for the Final gather File. Make sure Final gather Rebuild is set to On
We don’t need to render the entire image, we just need the FG map in the script editor type select mentalrayGlobals; Change the render Mode to Render Final Gather Maps

Note: Maya 2009 has this option exposed in the main render settings window

 

The FG map will be written in the following location
C:\My Documents\maya\projects\default\renderData\mentalray\finalgMap

Note:  to view the FG map go to Window > rendering Editor >mental ray > Map Visualizer
load the map file to view it in the perspective view

Now that the map is created, make sure you do the following
1- set the Render Mode to Full render rather than Render final gather Maps
2- Change the Final gather Rebuild to Freeze

Render from command line as a previously mentioned example: render -r mr -reg 0 250 0 400 -im tile01 myFile.ma Now we have No seams in our tiles.

Hint: generating a Final gather map will help reducing flicker when rendering animation files.

Assigning different textures per UV tile with SSS shader

Introduction:
The purpose of this white paper is to illustrate how to apply different textures per face while using SSS shader and ender it with mental ray.

The approach
The objective is to assign different texture files to a creature while using SSS shader.

Preparing UVs.
The first step is to layout the UVs in different regions in the UV editor

UVs in different regions.

Preparing the texture.
In the Hypershade create 4 different texture file nodes and lay them out according to their position in the UV editor.

4 different file textures.

In the attribute editor for all texture files under Color Balance
Change the default color to be black (value is 0)

In the attribute editor for all Place2dTexture nodes uncheck the Wrap U and Wrap V, so now the texture will not warp on all the UV regions.

The objective now would be assigning the file texture to its corresponding UV layout.
For this you will need to the file placement in the 2d Texture Placement Node

For file 1 leave to have the default values.
For file 2 change the translate Frame to 1.0 and 0.0 (that mean it will move 1 unit on the U direction and remain at the 0 for V)
For file 3 change the translate Frame to 0.0 and 1.0
For file 4 change the translate Frame to 1.0 and 1.0

 
Translate Frame.

Note: you can test your results by assigning a Lambert shader to the creature and applying each file to the color value of the Lambert.

Connecting texture files.
In the Hypershade grab +/- Average node and put in the working area next to the 4 file textures.

MMB drag the file 1 texture node onto the plusMinusAverage node from the popup menu choose Input3D[n] = 0

Connecting the file texture to the plusMinusAverage node.

Rendered image with SSS shader assigned to the creature.

Open the attribute editor of the SSS shader, MMB drag the plusMinusAverage node and drop it onto any of the attruibtes of the SSS sahder
For this case it’s going to the front SSS color.

 Rendered image with 4 different file textures and SSS.

Repeat the previous steps with the remaining file textures and connect them to the Input3D[n] 1, 2 and 3.Make sure theat the Operation is set to Sum in the attribute editor of the plusMinusAverage node.

The Attribute editor for the plusMinusAverage node.

Create an SSS shader and assign to the creature.

Final shading network.

Conclusion.
You can have high detailed different texture files that can be used in conjunction with mental ray SSS shader.

What's new in Maya Composite 2010?

One of the driving ideas was to remove the publish modes and render modes so that one would not depend on project preferences to render. The typical problematic workflow we wanted to fix is:

. Alice creates a composition.
. Alice selects the custom "My Super Publish Mode" for her comp.
. Alice sends the composition to Bob who doesn't have this render mode in his project.
. Bob wants to render, but has no idea what render settings were intended.

Render Tab in Output Node UI
=========================================================================

To fix this, we moved as much render-related information as possible from the project down to the compositions and their output nodes to remove dependency on the project preferences. You can see this in the output node's new Render tab.
To replace 2009's render modes, users can create presets on the output nodes. Another advantage of this is that you get to see where the files for a given output will end up. For example, the tooltip displayed when overflying the "File Name" text field actually resolves the substitution tokens.

Render Project Preferences
=========================================================================

What remain in the project preferences are the following two tabs:

1. Project Preferences: Render

---

Default values for output nodes, only used when creating new compositions.

In Maya Composite, when there is a possibility to enter information both in the project preferences *and* in the composition's UI (or in one of the node's UI), the UI in the composition always has precedence and the UI in the project preferences is only a default for new compositions.

2. Project Preferences: Render Actions

---

Mostly equivalent to the publish modes of Toxik 2009, but compositions are not associated to render actions. You can see that the "Publish Mode" popup is gone from the Composition tab in the main UI. Instead, the render floating UI remembers the last render action on a per-user basis.

Recognizing that the editing of render actions (previously known as publish modes) was tedious, the command-line text field has become a large scrollable text editor. Furthermore, recognizing how lost one can become when injecting a typo in the render command - especially the backburner one - we added a "Reset" fan-out in the right-click operations of the list on the left. This way, one can reset to any of the three system defaults (Foreground, Background, Backburner).

Launching Render
=========================================================================

Another driving factor in 2010's render workflow was to fix the lack of feedback when starting a render. Hitting the "Publish" button would perform 1 or 2 tasks (create version and possibly render) that users eventually understood but was always non-intuitive at first.

Recognizing that rendering and creating a version only rarely done at the same time, we've split them. Creating versions can now be done with:

. Top menu: File -> New Version
. Hotkey: Alt-N
. Versions Tab: New

Render can be launched in a variety of ways. Each way will cause a predictable set of outputs to be enabled in the render UI:

. Right-click on a composition in the browser: enables the "renderable" outputs in the working version.
. Right-click on a version in the browser: enables the "renderable" outputs in the selected version. This is done by ticking off the "Collapsed Compositions" property in the browser, and navigating to a composition's "[Versions]" directory.
. Right-click on one or more outputs in the schematic: enables the selected output(s) in the currently open version . In the top menu: File -> Render: enables the selected output(s) of the currently open version.
. Hotkey: Alt-R: enables the selected output(s) in the currently open version (new in beta 3)
. Versions Tab: Render Selected: enables the selected output(s) in the version selected in the versions browser (new in beta 3)
. Versions Tab: Render Renderable: enables the renderable output(s) in the version selected in the versions browser (new in beta 3)
. Versions Tab: Render All: enables all outputs in the version selected in the versions browser (new in beta 3) (new in beta 3)

Render UI
=========================================================================

The render UI enumerates the outputs present in the composition's version, and lets the user chose the ones that will get rendered, as well as the time range and the render action (foreground, background, etc.).

Note that a "renderable" output means an output for which the Renderable toggle is on in the main tab of the output node's UI. This is just a way to control whether rendering will include or not this output by default (always overridable from the floating render UI).

Output Description

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Individual outputs have a description (range, image resolution, file type, etc.), as well as the destination. The Edit button lets you visit the associated output node's UI should you wish to make changes. Maya Composite now remembers what tab was visible the last time a node was selected, and returns to this tab when re-selecting the node.

Time Range

---

The time range in the render UI has a reset button, which will reset the values to include the start and end of all currently selected outputs. Note that many of these subtleties are documented in tooltips, so please turn them on for exploring this.

Quick Access to Project Settings

---

We've added a quick-access to the definition of the render actions from within the render UI. This pattern should show up more and more in Maya Composite, as it's always been source of confusion: "where is the UI that defines this?".

Feedback

---

Finally, you'll notice that the UI provides better feedback during render preparation: it tells you that it's preparing, instead of blocking as in Toxik 2009.
The foreground render provides better feedback (frame numbers) and the application's UI is no longer frozen between frames while rendering in foreground.

Is AO bake is multithread?

Maya Baking is based on Light map shaders.

Each light map shader cannot leverage multithreading since the mental ray architecture assign 1 object bake per thread. So if you are baking a single object, you will see CPU activity on one core only. But if you have N objects to bake, it will dispatch each objects to each core, hence leveraging multithreading.

Rule of thumb: 1 object bake per core (thread). If you want to maximize baking, trigger baking with several objects at the same time, and Maya/MRFM will maximize each threads. For instance if you launch bake over 100 objects, and you have a 8 core box, then I will start waves of 8 objects to bake, and go throught the list until the list is empty. (1..8, then 9..16, etc…) But if you are baking a single object, there is no multithreading, since it is one object per core.