Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Default Render Globals - Part 1
Ever send a render only to find out the next morning that it rendered with the wrong camera? Or that it rendered several wrong cameras and filled up your hard-drive with useless frames?
It's challenging sometimes to keep track of which cameras in your scene are "renderable," especially if you're using a complicated reference pipeline. (There've been times that I could've sworn I turned them off and they turned themselves back on.) Here's an easy way to manage them.
The defaultRenderGlobals node stores a lot of useful information, including a list of which cameras are renderable and what channels are included (rgb, alpha, z).
To select the node, just type defaultRenderGlobals into the selection field on the status line at the top of the screen and hit enter. Alternatively, you could type select -r defaultRenderGlobals and enter in the command line.
With the node selected, all you need to do is go down the list and check off which cameras you want to render.
Labels: Maya, Rendering, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 7:38 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Monday, June 2, 2008
Disney and Pixar
There was a good article in the New York Times yesterday about the relationship between Disney and Pixar before and after the acquisition. As much bad blood as there was a few years back, things have certainly turned around. It's an interesting read:
The Power of the Prenup
Labels: Disney, Industry News, Pixar
+ posted by Paul @ 10:59 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Sunday, June 1, 2008
Tip of the Week: Think Local
Here's a marking menu that even many experienced Maya users miss, but it's great for speeding up your workflow. If you hold down W, E, or R, and the left mouse button, a menu pops up to allow you to rapidly switch between Object, Local, and Global space. It keeps you from having to transform along an awkward axis (or from going to the Tool Editor every time to switch back and forth between modes).
While we're at it: also notice the "Align Along" option. It opens up a submenu with some useful features that allow you to do things like align the axis with a selected component, or manually type in a custom axis. Very useful for modeling and placing objects.
Labels: Hotkeys, Maya, Modeling, Tip of the Week