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.

Maya on the Mac

...I don't know why I install Apple's software updates. All they do is f-up my Maya experience. Oh, and Logitech's dropping the ball too.

Yesterday my right-click button stops functioning properly. "Huh, that's odd," I think. "Maybe I should check to make sure that I have all the correct drivers." Bad idea. After updating my Logitech drivers and restarting, my middle-mouse button's not working. A quick trip to the Logitech forums shows that there's a known issue with their most recent software and the most recent Apple OS update.

Christ on a crutch.

My next computer is either a dual-booting Intel Mac with a copy of XP Pro, or one of those sweet Dell M-90's.

For the record, I am accepting donations for the new computer fund.