ZBRUSH: Delete Tool

It took a bit of Google searching for something as simple as this, but it turns out the only way to delete a tool from your 3D Meshes palette is to delete it in the SubTool menu.  It's a bit counter intuitive considering all your subtools are nested under that tool / mesh, but once you delete all the subtools on that mesh, your tool has been successfully deleted from 3D Meshes palette.

MAYA: Viewport 2.0

I've been living under a rock hidden in the deepest cave known to man, because I just discovered Maya's viewport 2.0.  I've been so stuck in my ways in terms of workflow that I failed to notice this little gem hidden under the "Renderer" tab of my viewport.

What used to chug along at 3-5 frames a second is now blazingly fast thanks to what I can only imagine is GPU utilization.  Wonder what other wonderful tool exists in Maya's toolbag that I've been neglecting... the possibilities!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJNF7CZ-VjI

ZBRUSH: ZProject Brush

The ZBrush ZProject brush just became one of the most useful tools for my 3D printing pipeline.  I have an incredibly high detailed model of an engine that I have to make printable, with about 1.5 days of working time.

Naturally, I thought of ZBrush as my go-to toolbox for high poly mesh manipulation.  Using the "ProjectAll" feature under the SubTool panel yielded rough results.  There's just so much detail in the model that it requires a manual touch.  In comes the ZProject brush.

Essentially, it's the manual version of ProjectAll, allowing you to manually push and pull the geometry to fit the "plug".  Works almost like vacuum forming, and brought back fond memories of making aluminum foil clones of my Hotwheels cars, destined to by crushed by my RC car.

ZBRUSH: 3D Pixel Art

Accidentally stumbled upon a technique for creating 3D pixel art!  Using a very low resolution 'Remesh' setting under the Subtools menu, it'll create something similar to this:

DAILY DOODLES

This blog has become too much of a tech notes library, so here's some of my recent-ish digital 30min-to-an-hour digital doodles.  Hopefully I can get into the habit of doing these "daily" again soon.

("Grumpy Cat" was done with reference.)

ZBRUSH: 32-Bit Displacements

http://funwithcg.blogspot.com/2011/06/rendering-32-bit-displacements-in.html

AFTER EFFECTS: Resize All Comps JSX Script

As part of the Magic Lantern raw workflow I'm slowly developing, I needed to resize all the footage comps to 1920x1080.  For months I was doing it manually like a chump, highlighting each comp, hitting CTRL + K, and typing in "1920" into the width field.

NO LONGER.

Thanks to a Google search and a forum post by Dan Ebbert of motionscript.com, I now use a script to automate this task.  I'm still working on the code to fit the contents to the new comp size, but it at least eliminates the tedious task of changing the comp sizes.

For those that have never ran an AE script before, you go under FILE > Scripts > Run Script File...  But before that, you must create the JSX script file by opening the script editor.  Once the script editor is opened, type or paste this into it:

for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i++)
{  
    if (app.project.item(i) instanceof CompItem)
        {
        app.project.item(i).width = 1920;
        app.project.item(i).height = 1080;
        }
}

Once that's done, save it.  Run the script and it'll change all the existing comps inside your project bin to the designated "width" and "height" values.  You can change those numbers to suit your projects.

The difference that I've noticed is that the comp doesn't scale from the center, but from the upper left hand corner.  Not a big deal for me since I need the contents of the comp to fill the full comp size, but definitely something to note.

For the time being, I'm using the good ol' CTRL+ALT+F command to fit the footage to the new 1920x1080 comp size.  I'll update this post once I figure out how to resize to comp using the script.

V-RAY: GI Helps with Noise

While following this tutorial:
http://www.vray.com/vray_for_3ds_max/tutorials/rendering_an_interior_scene_tutorial.shtml#Part_I:_Adjusting_the_GI_settings

I did a few tests on a current project I'm working on, and GI on default settings help smooth out the image in terms of noise.

PHOTOSHOP: Precision Cursor Mode

CAPSLOCK-ON will enable precision cursor for brushes, and CAPSLOCK-OFF will return them to their normal cursors.

PHOTOSHOP: Interactive Brush Resizing

Holding ALT+RMB dragging will let you interactively resize your brush in Photoshop.

V-RAY: Refraction Interpolation

Under the shader attributes, enable the "use interpolation" under Refraction and it'll speed up the renders tremendously.  The only downside (or upside) is that it looks like a blurred version of frosted glass, rather than an accurate raytraced soft look.

BACKBURNER: WINDOWS 8 / WINDOWS 7: UNC Paths

Many thanks my buddy Wynbert for suggesting to use direct UNC paths under RUN, rather than hoping for the network view to populate all machines.  It's probably just my lack of networking knowledge, but Microsoft, you've always been a pain in the ass with networking.

WINDOWS + R, then type in \\COMPUTERNAME\

BAM.  Backburner mini-farm is up and running.

MAYA: Shrink Windows 8 Window Borders

This probably should sit under it's own "Windows 8" category, but it affects me most when working with Maya on my Windows 8 laptop.  I used the "regedit.exe" method mentioned in the article below.

http://www.howtogeek.com/130138/how-to-change-the-window-border-size-in-windows-8/

V-RAY: History Render Times

I can't seem to get the V-Ray render buffer to spit out the render times when I save a frame in the history panel, but if you uncheck "Hide Render View" under Render Settings, the Maya Render View will be blank, but it'll display the minutes and seconds it took to render the frame.

V-RAY: Refraction Errors with GI

My refractions were giving me little dots that look like photon map points, so I switched the Primary Bounce engine to "Light Cache" and it went away.  Also seems to render a little faster too!

Only issue is that the light cache is built depending on the render region size, so I was running into discrepancies when I was doing regional material tests.