Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Tip of the Week:
The File Texture Manager
Ever open up an old Maya scene to find that all of your texture maps are missing because you've moved or renamed your directories?
The File Texture Manager by Crow Yeh is a must-have tool for Maya users. It lets you analyze all of the file texture nodes in your scene with the click of a button. You can move or copy files from one directory to another, re-route paths to reconnect missing textures, and even batch convert file formats and filter types.
It's really great for keeping things organized. Any time you're opening up old scenes, compiling assets from different sources, or building a large scene with lots of file texture nodes, the File Texture Manager is a huge timesaver.
Just download the MEL script from the above link and copy it into the "scripts" directory under "My Documents."
Labels: Mapping, Maya, plug-ins, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 7:59 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
Afro Samurai
A friend told me about the mini-series about a year ago when it came out on DVD, and I finally got around to seeing it this week. Beautiful artwork and animation. I definitely recommend it:
Labels: Recommendation
+ posted by Paul @ 8:28 PM 2 Comments | Links to this post
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Monday, May 12, 2008
Tip of the Week: UV Layout Made Easy
UV layout can be frustrating. Here's a trick to speed up unwrapping UV on a character's head or on other challenging pieces of geometry.
Doing a basic cylindrical projection on a head is a good start, but you wind up with overlapping UVs in areas such as the nose, mouth, ears, and chin. You can clean it up by hand, but it's not easy, and it doesn't always turn out well.
One solution is to start by duplicating your model and performing the "average vertices" command on it until the mesh is nice and smooth. This reduces the amount of overlapping geometry. Do a cylindrical projection on the smoothed-out model, and you'll have a much cleaner UV layout. Since the averaged mesh has the same topology as the original model, you can easily use the Transfer UV Set functions to copy your nice clean UV from one to the other.
Labels: Maya, Modeling, Tip of the Week, UV
+ posted by Paul @ 9:18 PM 1 Comments | Links to this post
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Friday, May 2, 2008
Tip of the Week: Maya Hotkeys
Learning some of the hotkeys in Maya, along with mastering the marking menus, can accelerate your workflow up to lightning speeds. Two of my favorite hotkeys are:
"g" - Which repeats the last command. I find myself using this especially for speedy constraining when I'm rigging, or for repeated extruding during modeling. But the possibilities are virtually endless.
"y" - Which brings up the last "non-sacred" tool, which means the last tool you used other than move, rotate, scale, or pointer. I use this one constantly - especially for rapid modeling with the Split Polygon Tool or Split Edge Ring Tool. But again, it's great for anything, from the Joint Tool, to the CV Curve Tool, to the Paint Weights Tool.
Whatever your personal workflow, the "Last Command" and "Last Tool" hot keys are priceless.
Labels: Hotkeys, Maya, Tip of the Week