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.