10.10.09

Keep Maya from renaming your shaders.

Posted in MEL, update at 11:32 am by Seith

Every time you change a shader’s type in Maya’s attribute editor, Maya discards the name of your shader. So if you had a shader called “my_carefully_named_shader” that happened to be a Lambert, and you changed it to a Blinn, your shader would be automatically renamed “blinn1″. Great, no? No. So if like me you’re tired of Maya renaming your shaders when it shouldn’t, just go to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Mayaxxxx\scripts\AETemplates and open AEshaderTypeNew.mel. In the last proc (called AEshaderTypeCB(…)) find this line (usually at the very bottom):

delete $shaderNode;

And add this line just after:

rename $replaceNode $shaderNode;

And Maya will keep the name of your existing shader! Yay!

09.15.09

Easy GUI…!!!

Posted in MEL, update at 10:24 pm by Seith

The GUI (for Graphical User Interface) is a very useful tool to select a character’s controls without having to click directly on the body parts (which sometimes is impractical). Here I’ll show you how to build a GUI in an easy and intuitive way. No more coding long lines of widget in Python or MEL. Starting from this template you can quickly build your own custom GUI interactively by clicking on objects and moving them around. It’s very flexible, since you can click-and-drag to multi-select, and use CTRL-click or SHIFT-click to deselect. It uses a couple of scripts by the brilliant Hamish McKenzie (also known on the internets as MacaroniKazoo). Instructions and file are here.

Update: If you downloaded the ZooToolBox and seithGUI.zip before 9/19/09, then please re-download them both to fix the problems about “missing statements” and “No module named vMaya.triggered” errors…


09.30.08

Major poseLib update!

Posted in MEL, update at 12:11 pm by Seith

I’ve just made a major update to poseLib (version 4.4.0). The biggest addition probably being the long awaited support for Macs (and OSX). A big thanks goes to Ludo for taking the time to thoroughly test it!

Also, I’ve decided to switch poseLib from a freeware model to a honor-based system (basically a donation principle). It means that people who use and like poseLib can make a donation to help the development and express their satisfaction with the tool. But I didn’t want to turn it into a plugin with DRM and thus force users to buy it. As I said, it’s “honor-based”; you do what you choose to… :)