I’ve been working on getting my OS X render slaves integrated into my Win64 Maya environment recently, and it’s been very difficult to find matching OS X Universal compiles for common Mental Ray libraries.
Anyhow, I’ve started compiling some of the more common libraries for other people in the community who are in the same boat as me.
Jan Sandström (Pixero) just posted OS X Universal .so libraries that I compiled this weekend for the his entire JS_ series shader libraries on his site. Pop over and check them out, (under shaders->mental ray) and let me know if there are any bugs!
You’ll need to download the main packages for each shader you’re interested in, and the large .zip containing all of the Universal .so’s (also on that page).
Also, if you’re a Mental Ray shader writer who’s getting nagged all the time by people like me to make Universal compiles, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help out.
June 3rd, 2008
Now, fully one year after the launch of Windows Vista, heading into SP1 territory, Microsoft still hasn’t provided an easy means of turning off UAC (the “Windows Needs Your Permission to Continue” nags — User Account Control).
It’s not recommended to do this in all cases (because of viruses and malware), but if you’re good about your own usage habits — you don’t install unknown software from torrents or P2P, you don’t click every attachment in an email from an untrusted source — then read below for a step-by-step instruction on how to turn the obnoxious feature off.
(more…)
February 27th, 2008
As a bleeding-heart Macophile at heart, I’ve become really intrigued with Growl notifications. Growl is a cool little system (similar to Twitter, I’ve been told) that allows applications and system events to display Caller ID style messages on your Mac.
My usual Maya workflow is Maya/3D work on my Win/Linux boxes, and my other work (coding, design, illustration) I do on my Macs. I was thinking it would be nice for Maya on any render machine to send a growl render notifications to my main workstation, keeping me from having to bring various machines out of sleep / change KVM settings etc to see if batch renders have completed.
After a little bit of investigation, I discovered Netgrowl by Rui Carmo, which is a python framework for sending Growl notifications over a network.
In a leap of logic, I realized… Maya has Python integration now, but with a little bit of Googling I should be able to hack it to work, and I have.
Read on to download the script and learn how to use it.
Continue Reading June 9th, 2007
I’ve got a confession to make: I held off recording today’s session in anticipation
of the release of ZBrush 3. Now that I had a day or so to play with it, I’ve
learned a few tricks that will speed up the surface detailing process.
Continue on to read today’s entry and watch two sculpting videos.
Continue Reading May 18th, 2007
As much as I know everyone must love reading my ramblings about random subjects,
I’m not sure I can write particularly lucidly about sculpting in Zbrush. It’s
a very organic process where you add a little here, take a little from there,
push, pull, tumble etc.
At any rate, I decided to play with Camtasia and record my initial sculpt
session. It’s the full hour-ish session from beginning to end, compressed to
about 15 minutes runtime.
Continue Reading May 6th, 2007
So Where We?
When we last left off, we were ready to take our mesh into Zbrush for the first time.
What Zbrush (or Mudbox, if you’re so inclined) will allow you to do is get
the massing of your parts pretty close, very quickly. We’ll then head back
into Maya & get the head sculpt polished and work on some trouble spots on
the mesh.
Continue reading for part 3 in this series.
Continue Reading May 5th, 2007
After putting together the first day’s basemesh, I thought it prudent to absorb
a little more reference material that wasn’t toy-based.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Godzilla Movie Marathon!
Read on for my UV layout session, and a little discussion about the finer points of understanding your character before finalizing your model and rigging.
Continue Reading May 3rd, 2007
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a fascination with monster movies. Particularly
Japanese kaiju films, even more specifically, the big grandaddy of them all,
Gojira (Godzilla to the uninitiated amongst you). I’ve got about ten different
toys of the big G, seen all his movies, and I’ve got an extremely deep understanding
of his psyche in each of his different incarnations. Metaphors abound. I’ll
jump to his defense at the first sign of criticism, entering what’s become
known as Monster Lawyer™ mode, although that’s not specific to big rubber monsters.
I’ll do that for zombies, vampires, aliens and any other type of funny looking
awkward guy who doesn’t have a moral framework that lies within the bounds
of societal norms. Equal opportunity here.
I like bad guys. Nuff said. And strangely enough, given my fascination, I’ve
never attempted to model Godzilla in CG!
I’ve been looking for a project to work on my modeling, UVing, Zbrushing,
texturing & mental ray skills — not so much on the rigging this time out.
Godzilla seemed the absolutely perfect candidate: iconic character, ridiculous
amounts of surface detail, really limited range of motion, not so much on the
emoting. I can model & sculpt him with a really basic rig without getting into
super time consuming facial rigs, clothing or any craziness besides maybe a
touch of radioactive fire, some jiggle, and a relatively passive tail! So it’s
more like a week or two’s project in my off-time instead of a month.
Continue on for part one of a fairly lengthy & involved work-in-progress / tutorial journal.
Continue Reading May 1st, 2007
Well, tonight I figured I’d give Windows Vista RC1 a shot, and it’s been a ride.
An upgrade install ended (after four hours on a FAST, modern machine) with a blue screen of death on about the fifth restart, and the install CD’s startup repairer seemed hung after I let it run trying to fix stuff for another two hours, so I just decided to install from scratch.
The second time through, the install took about 45 minutes, and went rather smoothly except for auto detecting my via envy 24 based soundcard.
Once I got up and running on the new desktop, I noticed a disturbing trend. Unlike the security apathetic versions of Windows past, Vista treats everything as a potential threat.
You know how when you do something that requires admin privileges on OS X it asks you for an admin password? Once in a blue moon? Vista asks for you to give your permission for everything.
I think I’ve dismissed the “Windows Needs Your Permission To Continue” dialog about 2500 times tonight. It’s up so often that my muscle memory has already adapted and my mouse hand moves to the center of the screen anticipating it after every single click becuase it locks you out of the entire screen. Ocassionally it will warn you that it’s about to warn you. Not a joke. Launch control panel? Bloop! Copy a file anywhere other than C:/Users/? Bloop! Change your desktop pattern? Bloop! Switch to the display tab? Bloop! Click advanced? Bloop! Install driver? Bloop! We’re gonna warn you! Bloop! We’re warning you!
Continue Reading September 26th, 2006
I’ve just compiled a quick script that encompasses all of the memory hacks I’ve been using to make mentalray behave itself lately courtesy of folks on CGTalk and LAMRUG.
The script will add custom scene globals in Maya allowing you to set an overflow swap directory for mental ray, and also add attributes to modify the Maya memory zone in Maya 7 (Maya 8’s globals already include this).
In addition, it’ll select the mentalrayGlobals node at the end of the operation, or if those attributes already exist, so you don’t have to go hunting for the hidden node when you want to make changes.
Continue Reading August 29th, 2006
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