Maya Mental Ray - the basics of linear workflow

Finally had a bit of time, between all of the stuff (work, teaching, life), to create a few videos tutorials!
I love it when people take the time to create detailed tutorials and I've watched more than my share, so I thought it would be fun to make a few myself. Since I'm teaching animation right now, I'm always talking about that and I'll eventually throw some stuff up about animation things related to my class, but for now, I'm mostly doing stuff that I think is more interesting to me lately and maybe a bit more esoteric. Definitely not super advanced stuff for the most part (unless you're a total beginner, which is cool too), but just sort of picking and choosing what I feel like exploring. Some of it is might be a bit complicated and specific, like some rigging stuff, but others are about stuff I'm just learning the finer details of myself, like the mental ray joint that follows.
BTW, I know that I can be a bit over-explainy and pedantic sometimes. So sue me. Too much classroom time (I was a HS teacher in NYC before I started digital stuff). But I hate it when people assume I always know what they're talking about when I don't. Just went to my finacial advisor and WHOOSH. Right over my head. Didn't understand a word. Sometimes the simple stuff is interesting to me too, dude. I went a bit crazy with the first one, so it's in four parts. I also get a bit fast and loose with the specific lingo sometimes (gamma correction, gamma encoding, float, HDR, etc). Feel free to correct anything that's wrong or bugging you in the vids, or let me know and I'll do it.

Anyways, I'll throw a bunch of posts up as I see fit with the rest of these mama-jammas . . .
part1=gamma, part2=basic workflow, part3=real workflow, part4=basic post stuff


Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 1

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 2

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 3

Maya/Mental Ray: Linear Workflow Part 4
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the video:
1. The man, the myth, the legend . . . Master Zap

2. djx talks about linear and gamma
3. Andrew at 3dLight talks about linear for Maya/MentalRay
4. floze does a tute about linear rendering in a series of interiors
5. A long CGTalk thread about the topic
6. A much more detailed Mental Images thread
7. A detailed article by Yves Poissant on Tone Correction
Good lord. Here's a couple more for post-production stuff:
1. A bit of AE stuff
2. S'more AE, a bit more complicated this time
3. A good generally useful pdf

Maya - AddDoubleLinear node, the better way

This is a quickie. I've actually got a few videos with some slightly more interesting (I think) tutorials that I'll post up later.
I hate the +/- Avg node in Maya for adding two numbers. It usually takes some fussing to get it work correctly (I think it might even be buggy, or at least poorly conceived). So I usually use the script editor on the bottom left corner to create an "addDoubleLinear" node. This is more straightforward . . . takes two scalar inputs adds em and gives a result. Just type "createNode addDoubleLinear -n *name it what you want*".
The only problem is that this add node doesn't show up in the hypershade, which is where I do most of my connections. So here's a better way. . .
Create the ADL node like you'd create a mult/div node or other utilities with MEL. Instead of "createNode", use "shadingNode -asUtility addDoubleLinear".


This creates the ADL as a utility which shows up in the HS window under the Utility tab. Now you can finally sleep at night!

s'more scripts

A couple new scripts and some slight revisions of previously posted ones. First the old . . .
zbw_attributes.mel (rt_click "save as" to download)
Previously, I had a color slider just to change the color (via color override) of multiple controls at once. I've added some new stuff (or rather I made a different script and added the color stuff to that). Basically, this script will lock or hide (or unlock/unhide) all or any of the standard tranforms from the channel box. So for an FK controls that just use rotation, you could select all of them and lock and/or hide all of the tranlates, scale and visibility. The color stuff is also here, but in canvas format instead of slider format. The slider was just a bit too random for my taste.

zbw_playblast.mel
Same playblast script that was up before, just changed the background toggle to a canvas format for ease and added green so you can quickly key a test playblast into your comp or storyreel.


zbw_randomSelection.mel
I'm working on a job that requires me to have LOTS of objects in the scene and mess with them a bit to add a bit of randomness, so I wrote two quick scripts. This one will take a selection of objects and randomly remove a certain percentage. So if you wanted to change the shader on some objects or offset the animation on some objects, you'd select them all, then run the script and remove whatever percentage of them and go for it as a subgroup of the whole. This runs a random check on each object vs. the percent you enter.

zbw_randomTransform.mel
This script takes a selection and performs a random transform on each object based on the info you enter. You can do translation, rotation or scale (or all of them) either in world space or based on the current position. It cycles through the objects and calculates random values for each attribute for each object, so for lots of objects it may take some time. The example below was 2500 objects and 6 attributes and it took a couple of minutes. But I've had lots of situations where this would be useful, so I thought I'd script-ize it up.

As always, the code is a bit crude at times (no dummy checks on object types, etc). Maybe I'll clean it up later, maybe not ;)

The basis for the randomizing scripts was something like this:


As I said, there are about 2500 objects in the scene (placed by hand). I used the selection script to select a few squares here and there to change shaders to dirty up the mosaic. I wanted the pieces to blow away (based on objects in the 2d comp) but didn't want to deal with dynamics. So The random transform script was used to add a key frame to each object. Basically this whole animation is two keyframes on each object. One in place and one with the random transform script. I then selected a few and offset those two keys a frame or two a couple of different times. Took about 5 minutes total (2 of which were waiting for the random calculations). Not perfect, but quick and dirty (like I like it).

OMG - The Needful Head is available!

How could I have forgotten? Redoing a couple of jammy's on the site, but The Needful Head is now available on Amazon.com! Really shameful lack of shameful self promotion by me! Let me correct that. . . .
Here is where you can buy the DVD. It's nice. No really. There is a little making of section (mostly for my family, so they can see what I do) and you can listen to Halli's music and read the original book and there's a commentary and all kinds of other great stuff. (actually I think that's it).
You can also direct download it, too. Actually all of the options are here. If you want to purchase the institutional version (?) I strongly encourage that, too. :)
We thank you for your support . . . (Bartle's and James wine coolers anyone?)

Some more work doodles - vids soon

I'm actually in the process of figuring out how to get some demo videos up with good quality. My animation class is starting soon and I'm gonna put some of the stuff (or least Related stuff, hopefully animation, modeling and rigging vids) up here as videos, probably through Vimeo. Work has kept me really busy, though. I'll post some of the work stuff up here soon, too. Have bunches of it from the summer, but too lazy to pick it from my clients. Anyways, here are some more random doodles.
BTW, Richard Bailey is working on a new series over on his blog. Good stuff as always from ol' Richy.
As always, click for larger.
really no idea what this is. Maybe related to Dan Simmons' "Ilium". Liked that book. "the Terror" too.
I'm thinking about an animation about a science experiment gone wrong. These are some prelim doodles.
Been watching some physics lectures from Stanford on YouTube. I'm a nerd, this is Prof Susskind
no idea, but somebody pissed at something.

Work doodles from June July

Been Working a lot in the past month or so. Which, of course, is good. But leaves less time for doing other stuff, like fun things for the blog, Ilksville, Psychemy, and some more tutorials for my NYU class. But I get paid (not paid like Eric B. and Rakim "Paid in Full", but paid like normal slobs like me get paid), which makes up for a lot.
Because I was doing quite a bit of rendering, I had some time to doodle. Thought I would throw some up here. These are just things on scraps of paper while I'm sitting around. . . (click any of em for larger)

roller ball pen, guess I was into sports that day
pencil
pencil, rock n roll!
pencil, shmarmy dude
pencil, one of the guys I just worked with had impossibly good posture
sketchbook pro



I'm thinking about doing some "cel" animation, but i'm not loving the way Flash is drawing. Wouldn't want to use Photoshop and exporting things are a bit of pain from Sketchbook. Maybe I'll try drawing in Corel. I hear they have some animation layers/tools. Anyone have any ideas?