Essential Maya Tools

As part of an ongoing series, I humbly present Lightgirl.

This lighting GUI, built in MEL, is absolutely insane and one hell of a lifesaver if you have a scene with more than, uh, one light in it. It was built by Ben Wronsky, who I don't know personally but is apparently a Senior Technical Artist over at EA Games. Looking at this, I wish I was a Senior Technical Artist but I have to realize that for all my many gifts, I just ain't smart enough to pull off something this rad.

It's available both on his site & on highend3d.com. It's a must have if you care at all about being able to easily control the lights in your scenes. I found it while looking for a tool that would allow me to change the intensity attribute of a cluster of four lights. Without a tool like this, it's a matter of selecting one, changing it, then selecting all of the others and repeating - one at a time. This makes for lots of steps and lots of preview renders if you're trying to find a setting that looks "just about right."

Bah! All that crap is behind me now. The one caveat is that the UI isn't perfect in the OSX environment, but that's what I get for using Maya on a Mac.

Cheers.