Maya Station

The Move Tool manipulator has disappeared!

You can see the Rotate Tool and the Scale Tool manipulators, but the Move Tool wotsit has gone!

1. Select the Move Tool and open the Tool options.
2. Turn off Tweak mode.

Et voila !

Actually I love Tweak mode....when I'm animating it allows me to move my puppets by just dragging the cursor over them...gone are the days of click-select, click-move, click-select, click-move.....

The Prune Membership tool breaks my deformer!

1) Create a polySphere.

2) Select the vertices.

3) Create a cluster.

4) Paint the cluster weights so they falloff to black in some areas (make sure that these values are 0.000).

5) Prune Membership > Cluster to remove the vertices with 0.000 values from cluster1Set. 

6) Select the cluster1 handle and move it to test the deformation...

How to update material assignments on a referenced model.

So you want to take your character model (let's call it fileA) and reference it into a new scene (fileB) so you can rig it...That way, your buddy can refine the model while you work on the rig.

Then you realise that none of the material assignments your colleague makes in fileA are visible to you on the referenced model in fileB.

You turn to your buddy...

 

 

Create simple collisions without dynamics (or MEL)

A simple rigid-body relationship between two or more objects can be achieved without using Maya's dynamics engine.

In this example, the cam and the plane are connected by a couple of constraints. It's almost as accurate as a dynamic simulation but much faster to tweak.

Best of all, the simulation updates interactively as you scrub the time-line.

using interpolation in expressions

Another oldie but goodie (new stuff is coming, I promise! email me if you have a request or leave a comment)

In an expression, you may want to have a values ease in and out  a bit when going from one value to the another.
The smoothstep command is there to help you do that, but you may not find it to be very intuitive.

Prepare for playblast

Sometimes we want our playblasts to look more like a rendering and remove all the UI elements from the view. Of course after running the playblast, we want our view to be restored to what it was.

Here are two little bits of MEL that can help you do that quickly.

how to transform a plane into a sphere

We're going to try to get a bit more involved in participating in discussions on the Area here, so today, I'll do something really old school. The first time I was asked to do this was in the early '90s when I was using the Advanced Visualizer. It's really not so hard, once you get your head around it.To turn a plane into a sphere, we first make it into a half cylinder, with a bend deformer, and then use a second bend deformer to fold the half cylinder into a sphere.

Turn a Joint node into a regular geometric object with MEL

Occasionally I decide I need to add a Shape node to a Joint. This usually happens when I'm rigging a character and want to to give the animator direct control of certain parts of the underlying skeleton.

GDC demo videos available

If you haven't attended GDC or if you missed the streaming of the GDC presentations, they are now available at http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/events/gdc_2009_videos

See Lee Fraser demo modeling and UV layering enhancements, animation layers and Assets in Maya 2009. We also have a demo by Ludovick W. Michaud of Janimation on their  007 Quantum of Solace Cinematic.

All in all, over an hour worth of great Maya content. Enjoy,