Anim Bizz

Pose 2 Shelf Gotta give props to simple, good scripts. I was posing out some wing shapes on a character and I was looking for a simple pose storing script. Here it is. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/pose-2-shelf Simply select your controls, name your pose and BAMM it saves the pose as a button to your shelf. Gotta like that stuff.

V-RAY for MAYA shader library Yes! For you people out there who use Vray, I highly recommend you grab this shader library tool by Oliver Markowski. It comes with a shwack of presets, a test sphere file that you can create and export your own shaders and a very cool GUI for Maya. It's a bit of work to install and NOTE: you have to convert all of your .jpg preview files to .png files for them to be viewable in the GUI. But when it's up and running - this is a great tool for shader organization.

Constraint Burn + Extrude along face normal burn Did I miss something on an update or have I just done too many bad things to my brain lately? I always used to use the 1W0 attribute to animate a constraint on and off. Now it seems there is a Blend Point 1 attribute that does the job. When you create a constraint this is added in your channel box right after visibility. Anyway, had me going in circles for a bit. And another one! Making even indents or extrudes on objects...not so intuitive in Maya. I needed to make the indents on a mouse button and after my extrude I was looking for all types of settings on the move tool. The 'normals' only works on nurbs and verts. To move faces inward or outwards along normals you need to use the edit mesh/transform components tool. Jeez.

THE ZEN Ahhh Maya transfer attributes...why oh why do you add a history node to the stack when transferring. I had a situation where I needed to match the vertex positions of one object to another. The problem is that it adds a non-deletable node to the target's history. If you delete it, the tweak reverts. Lame. Why can't it just query the vertex position of the base object and copy those values to the target verts?  Well thankfully there's a script that does just that. It the ZEN yo! http://dissentgraphics.com/tools/zentools/ There are a big shwack of scripts in this suite but the tool I am talking about is in the mel folder. It's called  doZenTransferPointPositions.mel Select your base object and your target verts and run it. SNAP. Vert positions copied.

Yea! Here is a sweet script that allows you to execute, source and edit scripts all within one window. I can't say how annoying it is to have to source a script then type it into the MEL line. This script is UI genius. Check it!

Automation automation....au-to-mation I've been out of the rigging loop for a while but man there are some sweet new tools. Anzovin's The Setup Machine 2 is pretty damn sweet. But here's a niiiice reverse foot setup script that puts in all of your toe roll, heel roll etc etc automatically. Gotta dig it! The script is over at Creative Crash but here's a video showing it's slickness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIDLIY5Ls5o

1 Button stretchy IK Man I'm a sucker for 1 button anything. Check out this script that once you've built your spline IK....select the IK handle, press the button via this script and yes - super stretchy IK. Lov it. Stretchy IK over at Creativecrash

Lovin' VRAY for Maya's VRAY Blend material Sometimes the most simple things tweak my brain. I remember the pain of having to use mix8 nodes in Mental Ray. This mucho bettero. 1. slap down a vray blend MTL. 2. Throw a semi transparent shader in as your base. 3. add in another shader with a blend amount or use a texture to determine blend amounts. That's it. Insta-layered shader. Awesome.

GOODBYE MENTAL RAY! After going over digital tutor's introduction to vray for maya, I'm pretty convinced that it's far better than MR. With GI, motion blur, caustics, blurry relflections all on - I can still get decent render quality and times....on my laptop. I recommend this Digital Tutor tut if you are thinking of dropping into VRAY. http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=431