Maya Station

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.

Why does the render command create folders for my images?

If you use the command render to create images from a given camera, you may wonder why Maya  sometimes creates an extra folder, labeled with the camera name, and saves your image here rather than directly in the Project/tmp directory.

Let me explain when this happens, and how to avoid it.

What is cameraShape "cameraPrecompTemplate" attribute for

It is a file that tells Toxik how to handle the images rendered through that camera.  The precompositing templates are not used by Maya. 

Maya just allows the user to associate a precompositing template with a camera.  This association get saved to the .precomp file when you export for precompositing.

Print the name of the render camera to the Output Window.

Occasionally, when I render a frame, my heart sinks when I see the first pixels appear in the Render View as I realise that I rendered the wrong camera.

 

I'm going to show you how to print the name of the render camera to the Output Window. And by modifying a Maya start-up script, you can make this a default feature.

Adding multiple mental ray lens Shaders to a camera

- Select the camera
- In the attribute editor under mental ray section, expand the Lens Shader section
- Hit create > you will get the option to choose the lens node
- Add the nodes of your choice
- You can move them up and down to get the desired effect

camera shake

In a post on Ask Autodesk this week, we were asked about the camera shake attributes that you can find on the cameraShape node, in the Attribute Editor. They are new in Maya 2009.