Neat MEL Trick

I'm thinking it's time to get back to blocking out some of the shots in the first scene. I started trying to put together the first scene - not using references which we'll eventually do - but by bringing together all of the models into one scene. I ran into trouble with the clocktower model.

It's saved as a Maya Binary file and was modeled in Maya 8. Now, I'm working with Maya ASCII files in Maya 2008. For some reason it just wouldn't import. I kept getting a

"File contains unknown nodes or data."

I spent a good 20 min. going through the model in the Hypergraph, deleting history, looking for wonky nodes but I couldn't find anything. Then, well duh, I am taking a MEL class, right? Two little lines of code solved my problems.

select `ls -type "unknown"`;
delete;

Sweet.

No New Work

On my end at least, progress on the short has been slow. It happens, of course, but once MEL/Python class is over, it'll be time for me to really kick some arse on this thing.

So, how's class going? Pretty well. This past week was my first introduction to Python, which is new to Maya as of version 8.5, I think. Python's another scripting language. According to Wikipedia, it's a high-level scripting language. That does make me feel pretty cool. It's not Maya-centric and it's currently implemented in XSI and Houdini as well. That's probably a great thing for some of the larger shops with a number of different packages in their pipelines. A programmer could write one set of tools and have it running within three different environments.

Python's also a pretty clean language. It takes whitespace into account, meaning it matters if you start a new line with a "tab" or with a single-space or with no spaces. That just seemed weird to me at first, but I'm starting to appreciate how it forces a visual hierarchy on your code. In a sense, it's like you're kerning and breaking your entire script, doing what you need to to make it look clean and readable. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

Right now we're doing things like writing scripts that automatically build IK chains and such. What's an IK chain? That's another post.

Maya Tip of the Day #3

Or maybe this is "MEL Tip of the Day #1." You be the judge.

So, I'm starting up a MEL scripting class through CGSociety. I'm pretty excited, though it will definitely take a small chunk out of my free time and slow down my work on this project. My hope, however, is that at the end of the class I've have a few more tools at my disposal that will speed up my work on the project as I come out the other side.

From time to time I'll try and post some MEL goodies and here is the first:

JEdit.

JEdit is a text editor, Java-based so it's platform agnostic and highly customizable. I played with it a little bit and liked it but I didn't love it. There was something about the Java feel that didn't sit right with me. I played with a couple others, namely TextMate and TextWrangler and found them decent enough but uninspiring (this is on OSX, so the biggies like Crimson Editor and MEL Studio Pro aren't in the running).

And then I kept crashing Maya. I'd type some code into TextWrangler, copy it, command-tab to Maya, paste it, run it, command-tab back into TextWrangler, type some code...rinse and repeat until Maya said "ENOUGH!" Maya does not like rapid-fire application switching.

...sigh...There's gotta be a way to execute code in Maya right from within a text editor, right? Right. And the right choice for that is JEdit. Remember how I said it was way customizable? I wasn't kidding. Following a blog post on Sean Nolan's site, I found a tutorial on highend3d written by a guy named Ron Bublitz, who is way, way too smart for me to really get a handle on. He wrote up a couple macros and a tutorial on how to configure JEdit to send your script into Maya and have it executed there. Seriously.

I even did it. I typed "polyCube" in JEdit, clicked a button in my toolbar and there was a little wireframe box in Maya. Magic. Will wonders never cease? Not at this rate.

Tip of the hat to Mr. Bublitz and JEdit and keep yer eyes peeled for more insane scripting action coming your way. I may even write some MEL that would make TWO little boxes appear in Maya! That would be something...

Holiday Slowdown

No updates lately...but that's what happens sometimes.

So what's the news, both good and bad? Well, the work project that felt like a mini Bataan Death March is in a much better place now. It didn't air on the 26th as it was originally meant to but I think the pressure from Discovery has lessened a bit and we should be able to finish it working only "normal" hours. When this sucker does finally hit the teevee, I'll post an update.

Holidays were great with two sets of folks in town. One set's still here but all the hoopla's died down enough that I've been able to start laying out UV's on the first building. w00t!

With Borders gift card in hand, I went book shopping the other day. I had a long list of books I wanted, but on a whim decided to check the computer section for a book on mental ray. I didn't really want a book on mental ray but I knew that I needed to learn more about it. I only know what half (a third?, quarter?) of the mental ray shaders do and I'm far from being able to optimize renders in any way. Well, I found a damn mental ray book and forced myself to buy it.

mental ray, an artist's guide to rendering is one hell of a book and it's already making my brain hurt. a lot. I'm giving it a first read-through with a highlighter and without sitting in front of the computer. After going through it once, my plan is to go back through and crank out test renders, to see if I learned anything. Cross yer fingers.

The last bit of good news for now is that in a couple weeks I'll be starting a MEL scripting workshop offered by CGSociety. I'm excited to dig in to a little code. It will probably slow down the project some but I don't think it'll grind to a total halt. Hah! Of course it will, but I can dream, can't I?

No pics to post now, because there's nothing remotely interesting about UV layouts. I'll post painted texture maps but that's still a little ways away.

Cheers.

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.

Tricksy Camera, version 01

So all the futzing and time wasting and random code typing is done for now. I've got a camera rig that I'm going to live with for a little while, see if my half-baked ideas for what would make a workable set up make any sense at all.

Here's a copy of the Maya scene file (Maya 8) and the script. To try it out, import the camera rig file into any Maya scene, position it roughly, then run the script.

(screenshot of the rig and the GUI)

Now that this is in a workable state, I'm moving onto the animatic for the film, just blocking out shots and figuring out rough timing. I'll probably have stills to show as I go along but not much very exciting as models I'll be using in it are going to be very, very basic.

Cheers.

Maya Tip of the Day #2

This one is a little MEL script that's far from finished but that's gonna make it into my camera GUI in one form or another.

window -title "test Field Slider";
showWindow;

polyCube;
float $currentXLocation = `getAttr pCube1.tx`;
columnLayout;
attrFieldSliderGrp -min ( $currentXLocation - 15 ) -max ( $currentXLocation + 15 ) -at pCube1.tx;

This creates a slider that slides the cube on the X-axis +/- 15 units based on wherever the cube is when the script is run. Wow. Now that is...uh...what exactly is that?

The way I see it working is as follows:
The camera and aim are blocked in roughly using the 4-pane orthographic & perspective views. Once the basic shots are set up, I'm going to need to refine them while looking through the camera. It's at that point that I'll call up the GUI and there I'll have sliders and keyframe buttons to dial in the actual shots. Because the transforms are locked on the actual camera in my rig (to avoid gimbal lock and throwing the camera totally out of whack) you can't move the camera using the usual pan & dolly mouse controls.

This rig is taking me about nine years and seventeen days to build but an end is in sight. I think.

Cheers.

MEL Script = Headache

Ugh. I just spent the last several hours puzzling over how to do a bunch of different things for my camera rig. I've come the conclusion that a lot of the things that I put in my original rig & UI aren't really necessary any longer, particularly having two Aim Constrained locators and animation sliders for both of their weights.

I liked the idea at first. My plan was to aim the main locator at the main target of the camera and then have the secondary locator pulling it off target, bringing a little life to the camera. But if you think about how many possible animation tracks there would be in the graph editor with that kind of set-up, it gets ugly. Also that way of aiming the camera has no real relationship to the way an actual camera works. Not that a CG camera has to mimic a real world camera but I should probably have a decent reason for making it drastically different. Plus there are plenty of ways to bring life to the camera that would be more direct.

Alright. I'm tired. That's it for me. A copy of the rig will be up here eventually.

Moving Onto The Animatic

Looks like I'm on a weekly update schedule, which I'm not very proud of but it's a schedule at least.

So, the brief is in the hands of an artist I've worked with before. He's giving it a quick pass for clarity and to assess the reasonableness of what I want to get versus what I'm paying. It's not that I have no money to spend on an artist but it's more along the lines of, I'm offering one day's day rate and asking for, probably, more than one day's worth of work. Nevertheless, it's very important to me that I am offering paid work. All of the time in this industry you see "offers" for people to do free work because it'll "look great on their reel/portfolio." Now, I've done free, low-budget and work-in-trade but on this thing, I don't want to go that way. If an artist I already had a relationship with offered to do the concept art in trade I'd probably go for it, but I'm not going to approach someone I don't know hoping that they're in the mood to throw me some charity. This film is, for me, a real project and I intend to treat anyone who works for me on it professionally.

Enough time on the soapbox. One place I am planning on going for some free help is the CG Society forums. Now that the storyboard is considerably tighter (though probably not "done") I feel like it's time to get the animatic cranking. Earlier, before our change of direction, we brushed past the animatic but I think that this time it's important to make one. It'll help us really suss out our shots, it'll suggest which shots are just plane lame and can be cut and it'll give us an idea of whether or not the structure of the scenes makes any sense. In order to work on the animatic, I returned to look at the camera rig I was building a few months ago. That's what I'm going to be asking for some help with. I'm pretty happy with that I've built but it's not working exactly as intended. I'm hoping someone up there can throw some pointers my way.

I'll post screens and the MEL script once it's in a place I'm happy with.

Cheers.

How Do I Know I'm Cool?

Because I'm blogging about a MEL script written back in 2001.

Yes, it's Connect Poly Shape 3.0, written for Maya 4.0 by Dirk Bialluch, who is a certified Maya Master. Well, it may be old, but it's pretty damn swank. It provides a crazy-useful toolset for creating and manipulating low-poly meshes and associated higher-poly smoothed meshes.

Full disclosure, all I've done so far is DL the script, drop it into a shelf and play with it for 3 min. But if that 3 min. is in any way indicative of how useful this script'll be over the long haul, then damn!

Carry on.

Modeling Clock Faces

I jumped from the rough clock face Illustrator designs into the modeling and I'm okay with the results. I'm not through the moon, though, as the scale on them probably needs some tweaking. It's hard to tell how much of the detail I've put into these is going to show. If it's just going to get lost, all those beveled edges and extra gears are gonna have to go.

I'm also wondering if the style I picked is too complex for where the tower sits in the scene. I'd been thinking that as it's so large (to scale the clock face is a good 5' tall), I could use one of the more detailed clock concepts. I'm not sure that that's the case, looking at this first pass. Still, I don't have the back of the clock faces figured out, nor are there any textures on these. There's probably a lot I can do to make these current designs work a bit better in the scene. I will try and do some of that tomorrow. No promises, though, as it be a holiday and all.

Cheers.

Oh, one shout-out I wanted to toss out was to Davvey, over on Highend3d. I used his pretty amazing Gear Generator MEL Script for some of the cogs in the clock face. I didn't dive too deeply into it but what was great is that it gave me correctly interlocking teeth on a couple of the cogs. Thanks, Davvey!

Broken Cam

It's no longer being called "TricksyCam." It's now "BrokenCam."

I've not been testing the changes I'm making to the script as throughly as I should've been. Now, several steps on down the path, all sorts of transform controls are conflicting with each other.

The major issue is that the motion path is messing with the pivot points for Roll, Tilt and Pan.
The pivots are staying at 0,0,0 - the place where the camera was created. When the camera's offset by the motion path, the pivots should leave 0,0,0 and go wherever the camera is. Centering the pivots doesn't work/change a thing.

This has to be a problem plenty of other people have dealt with, but it's incredibly frustrating to meet right now, this far into the process.

Too, Too, Too Busy

Work on this project has nearly, but not entirely, ground to a slow burn. Not to a "halt." I didn't say "halt" and I'm not going to.

I'm still in GUI mode and I'm somewhat embarrassed to show how little progress I've made in the last three days as it only represents about 3 hours worth of work. Nevertheless, I need to stay in the habit of posting here, so here's the updated GUI.


There's what, three extra controls on there?

The Wander on the camera is a really nice effect that I grabbed from Richard Morris over at The Jackal's Forge. He put up a great tutorial on building a very detailed, multi-variable camera shake utility. The Wander I'm using here is actually what he calls "Destabilize." Of the four shaking functions he describes, this is my favorite. It gives the camera a very natural-feeling sway that you don't really notice until you turn it off.

Moving on from here I'm going to add a couple of sliders to control the frequency and intensity of a more traditional "jitter" camera shake. That's not a ton of work, assuming that I can get a block of time to do it in, and from there it's back into the scene proper, using this rig to nail down the camera move.

Cheers.

I'm a Freakin' UI Designer

This week has not been the most productive week ever, but I did get busy trying to make a good control rig for our camera. It's been pretty fun and my crash course in MEL scripting is just impressing the hell out of me in terms of how usable Maya can be once you put in the time to figure it out.

The above rig is as simple as they get but it does have a check box that suggests that I may, in fact, be awesome. I'd check it.

This GUI and rig are, arguably, overkill for what we need the camera to do in this shot but this is an opportunity for me to learn how to make these things and make them useful. So, some overkill is just fine in the long run. It's all helping me in the end.

Crazy busy weekend coming up, but my goal is to make a much fancier GUI and then move on to dialing in the camera move.

A Whole Page Worth Of MEL Scripts

Edvard Toth has a whole slew of MEL scripts, several of which look very, very useful.

A search for "duplicate along curve" is what brought me here. Lord knows why doing this in Maya is a total work-around. I've been using the "animation snapshot" method, one of, I'm sure many ways to do something very simple and basic.

That's one of the quirks of Maya that I'm hitting my head against, having come to it after first learning 3d in Cinema 4d, the lack of nice, pretty buttons and clearly designed dialog boxes. Cinema is very friendly, with lots and lots of surface polish.

Maya, eh, not so much. It's a bit more like the less attractive step-sister who is way smarter and more interesting - not to mention fairly stand-offish. She's the one you want to spend time with in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it'll take a lot more effort. You just get the feeling that it'll be worth the investment.

2 more MEL scripts

The first is a camera shake expression, haven't used it yet, but I didn't want to forget about it.

2nd is a way old (2002, before I even knew what Maya was) script called GI_Joe, which may be somewhat obsolete these days but it creates a light dome for faking GI.

MEL Scripts, starting my collection

I work on a computer at work and at home and I have a devil of a time keeping things consistent between them. If I was some sort of 43 Folders/GTD guru I'd have all the answers (http://www.43folders.com/) but in terms of getting started, I'm gonna put useful links up here so I don't forget them.

One think I keep running into are MEL scripts. Someone's always pointing out this or that script that makes Maya way friendlier. I never DL them because I'm afraid I'll forget to install it on both computers, I'll forget that I even installed it, I won't remember what it does or why I thought it would be a good idea to get it. etc.

Well, hopefully, this site will make all that angst a thing of the past.

Introducing RandKey, by Mikael Hakansson (http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/animation/randKey-mel-462.html).

" This script brings up a window, which lets you randomize selected keyframes from the graph editor."

Why this script?

I came across in reference to organically deforming hard surface geometry, trying to give it more of a "real world" appearance, less crisp & CG. I suppose it has other uses as well.