Maya Station

Maya 2011 on Linux and the Hotbox

If you have installed Maya 2011 Hotfix 3 and see errors in the terminal or a black Hotbox in the viewport, we advise you to disable the CIOverlays option in your xorg.conf file, located in /etc/X11/xorg.com.

With the move to Qt in 2011 we no longer have a need for colour indexing.  Instead, as of Hotfix 3 we have introduced RGB overlays and this option should be used instead.

• Open your xorg.conf file
• Remove following line:
  Option      "CIOverlay" "ON"
• Add following line:
  Option      "Overlay" "ON"

The caveat here is that you cannot set both CIOverlay and Overlay at the same time, and users of Maya 2010 will be aware of the instabilities that can arise when working without CIOverlay.

So what do you do if you use both Maya 2010 and Maya 2011 on a daily basis ?

Allocate On Heap

Maya 2011 has this new feature that can help with memory related issues.
It is off by default, but you can enable it under options tab > performance
It will allow the shading engine to store temporary data on the heap (dynamically allocated memory).

From the Documentation :
 When raytracing through transparent materials, the shading engine stores temporary data on the rendering thread's memory stack. Occasionally, a rendering thread may run out of space on the stack, causing Maya to stop unexpectedly due to a stack overflow. To workaround this, select this option so that the shading engine stores temporary data on the heap instead of on the memory stack. Selecting this option causes mental ray for Maya to render slower, but it may prevent Maya from stopping unexpectedly due to a stack overflow when using a large number of render passes in a scene with many layers of transparent objects.

Autodesk Stereoscopy Whitepaper

For more detail on the concepts behind stereoscopy check out the Autodesk whitepaper on the subject

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/stereoscopic_whitepaper_final08.pdf

Also make sure to check the video done by Steven Roselle

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/stevenr/stereoscopy_in_maya2011

Autodesk Maya 2011 Hotfix 3

Autodesk releases its third Hotfix for Maya 2011. Download it from the Autodesk website.

Please refer to the readme file for the complete list of issues addressed in this Hotfix.

Remember each Hotfix release is cumulative; it contains the fixes from the Hotfix(es) that preceded it.

Note: You will also need to update your installation of mental ray Satellite and mental ray Standalone to benefit from some of the fixes in this release. Remember to uninstall your current installation of Maya 2011 before installing Maya 2011 Hotfix 3

For a complete rundown of what's new in Maya 2011, please refer to this post.

Artisan does not display deformer weights on selected surface.

You are using the Artisan paint tool to interactively modify deformer weights, such as cluster weights, on a NURBS surface. You expect Maya to display the deformer weights on your selected surface in greyscale or with color values, but apart from the outline of the brush you see no color feedback whatsoever.

The reason Maya skips the display of your deformer weights is because of a property that has been set on your surface object.

Exported selected to Mudbox on a Mac

To get it work properly you need to insure the application location is set correctly as Maya cant recognize the .app as excitable in OS X for Mudbox.

The workaround is to set the Application Path for Autodesk Mudbox, navigate to the application folder using the folder icon rather than manually inputting the path in the field.
Double-click the .app file and then navigate to Contents/MacOS/Mudbox.

Maya 2011 imf_disp is not showing the chosen pass.

If you would to render within Maya and EXR file that has imbedded passes in it.
the render view will display the master beauty render, to see the passes you would go to File > Load render pass and choose AO for example.
You would expect the display to show the AO pass, however it will show the master beauty.
The reason is the new imf_disp that is shipped with Maya 2011 will load the entire EXR file, placing the Main one at the top.

 

To view the desired pass, one should go to Layer > and choose the pass from the pull down menu.

MEL window example to catch users input

Here is a little example on how to create a window to catch a user's input, in this case the Render Settings startFrame, endFrame and byFrameStep values. The second step is to update those values in the Render Settings window with a global procedure.  The global proc is called with the -changeCommand (-cc) flag that is executing when the value of the field changes.

Here I am using these attributes as an example but really you can use most attributes that are integers.  Also note that I am using the control intFieldGrp even if there is only one field, this is because the intFieldGrp  has a label flag and the inField does not.

this is the proc that updates the values:

global proc updateRenderSettings()
{
int $updatedSF = `intFieldGrp -q -value1 int1Items`;
setAttr defaultRenderGlobals.startFrame  $updatedSF;

int $updatedEF = `intFieldGrp-q -value1 int2Items`;
setAttr defaultRenderGlobals.endFrame  $updatedEF;

int $updatedBF = `intFieldGrp -q -value1 int3Items`;
setAttr defaultRenderGlobals.byFrameStep  $updatedBF;
}
 

this creates the window:

string $window = `window`;
columnLayout;
    intFieldGrp -label "StartFrame" -value1 (`getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.startFrame`) -cc updateRenderSettings int1Items;
    intFieldGrp -label "EndFrame" -value1 (`getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.endFrame`) -cc updateRenderSettings int2Items;
    intFieldGrp -label "ByFrame" -value1 (`getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.byFrameStep`) -cc updateRenderSettings int3Items;
showWindow $window;

Need to know which polygon shell contains a given face ?

You can use polygon Selection Contraints rules to automatically expand your selection to the entire shell that surrounds your selected component.

My problem with using this method in a script, and then querying the new selection, is that I prefer to avoid changing the current selection in the middle of a script.

Instead I use the following command, which returns the members of a shell from a single faceID: polySelect.

optionVar and env. variables

Sometime you might want to set you optionVar with environment variables.  By default optionVar are set with full path but this is not always the desired workflow. 

You can easily set the optionVar with variables but using this type of syntax:

optionVar -sv "CustomFileDialogSidebarUrls" `getenv MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH`;

the important thing here is the "getenv", this is what will do the trick!