This is the tool I created for easy assignment of RGB Mattes for the objects in the scene during the maya render process.For those who havn’t used RGB matte passes in render, RGB matte passes help in extracting individual 3d elements from a maya scene render containing multiple objects. This handy tool helps in creating mattes for ambient, diffuse, Incandescence, and reflect channels with the click of a button.
The usage of the script is as follows source ak_rgbMatteTool.mel;
ak_rgbMatteTool();
This is one of the demo videos from the Maya muscle smart collision test, which I have been doing for the past few days.My initial plan was to start of with the skinning using Maya joints itself and convert it to Maya muscle system.But later I changed my mind and decided to go with rigorous testing of all the options provided by the Maya muscle menu set.Even though I had a glimpse at the options during the release of maya 2008 extension 2 itself, this was the first time I got to explore the skin weight options provided by Autodesk. Believe me, Autodesk has packed a lot of options keeping in mind the immediate need of a character setup artist that you will never want to go back again.
This one is the image of the muscle setup I used for testing the deformations.I didn’t spend much time on sculpting the muscle shapes.The target was to simplify various muscle groups in to one which would provide me enough options to test out the deformations.
Of course there were some bugs here and there which I found quite irritating, I was fortunate enough to find some solutions to them.
1.Maya was retaining the selection of the first muscle objects created showing some garbage values in the channel box.Unless you undo the first muscle and start it all over again, Maya wont show any signs of defeat.
2.Maya would end up in a fatal error if you ever happen to scrub the time line once the muscles have been bound to the mesh.This can of course be fixed by caching the geometry, But users like me who got accustomed to skinning the models by setting keys on the joints, are left with no choice other that creating floating GUI to control the joint rotation without deselecting the geometry.
Overall the collision feedback is fairly good with lot of skinning options to control each invidual portion of the geometry.
This script will let you setup the cartoon head squash setup similar to the cartoon head tutorial in the previous post.The script will add a squash control with the custom attributes maintain_volume and squash_factor.The rest of the procedure will be the same as that shown in the tutorial.
ak_makeStretchyUI.mel is a script that will help you build stretchy ik chains with invidual upper and lower stretch and also variable auto stretch options using utility nodes.
Usage:
source ak_makeStretchyUI.mel;
ak_makeStretchyUI();
This will open up a window similar to this. Select the ik handle and the global
