Installing Craft Animation Tools in Linux and Mac OS X

We introduced a few new tools for Maya subscription customers with the release of Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack. I wanted to take a moment and focus in on the software installation of one of these tools.  

Using Craft Animation Tools will give you access to four pre-rigged models of two cars and two planes, as well as four camera rigs Craft SoftMotionCam, Craft ObserverCam, Craft MultiStateCam, Craft HumanizerCam.   

When installing users of Windows will automatically get Craft Animation tools installed during the regular  Maya installation process but this is not the case for Linux and Mac users.  You will need to install it manually after the Maya install is completed.

Below are the steps needed to get Craft Animation Tools installed for Linux and Mac users.

Install the Craft Animations plug-in on Mac OS X

1. Double-click the Maya .dmg download package.
2. In the Finder window that opens, double-click the Support folder.
3. In the Finder window that opens, double-click the Craft Animation .dmg,then double-click Install. 

Install the Craft Animations plug-in on Linux

1. Extract the Maya packages from the compressed file.
2. Navigate to the Support folder and extract the craftdirectorstudio .tar.gzfile.
3. As a super user, navigate to the directory where you extracted the package.
4. Type ./install.bash.This starts the Craft Animation plug-in installation. Before using the Craft Animation plug-in for the first time, you need to loadthe plug-In using the Plug-in Manager.

To load Craft Animations Director Studio plug-in

1. Start Maya.
2. Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager. The Plug-inManager opens.
3. Locate Craft Animations and turn on Loaded.To load Craft automatically every time you start Maya, turn on Auto load.4 Click Close.

You can access the Craft Animations plug-in from the shelf by clickingthe DirectorStudio tab, then clicking the icon.

Comments

[Michael]

Does the Mac OS X version of Director Studio even work? The Subscription Advantage Pack comes with 10.1.3 and 10.1.4 has been released with Maya 64-bit support.

[Michael]

Ignore my last comment. I should think before typing.

[Angel]

Hi!, I didn't find a contact mail or something in your blog, and I would share this important information with you. Sorry for my bad english!

Hi,

I would like to warn you about the risk of install the new "Graphic update of SnowLeopard". Since I did it, I haven't done Batch Render yet with Mental Ray in Maya 2011. And in these days when I tried it didn't work. I tried everything and finally I suspected one of the updates, then I went to my office because there are more computers without system updates, and I could try what kind of system updates crashed MR. And I discovered that the problem was with the "Graphics update of SnowLeopard" it makes Batch Render not work. I tried with a MacBook Pro, 1 MacPro and 2 iMacs.

I hope that it helps you, Best regards.

[Andi]

@Angel: Batch Render is working here with all the latest Snow Leopard updates installed.