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About The Author
This is the personal blog of Bastiaan van Rooden / aka Spot (CEO/ Head of Rocket Age Development) of Nothing and scholarship-winning graduate of VFS, one-time Siggraph speaker for Pixar about his endeavours in computer graphics.-
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Author Archives: Spot
secret after effects settings
it sounds like a tip for a video game, but after effects cs3 has secret levels settings. they can even be so important for your project that you don’t understand why adobe hid them. in my case, i had …
using the black hole
there’s a material setting in maya which doesn’t seem to be very well known but is extremely powerful when it comes to creating passes with render layers. i’ll explain this feature by going through a practical example: i have …
Posted in Maya, Post Production, Tricks
Tagged black hole, matte, Maya, render layer
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the traffic light is alive
the opponent of lt. lou, the protagonist in my upcoming short is nothing else but a traffic light. as they will interact quite intensely, i decided to rig it, too. this time it was really easy: spline ik for …
lieutenant lou’s first smile
similar to the joy a programmer experiences when he learns a new language and the computer spits out a the first “hello world”, the creation of a 3d face smiling back to you after weeks of fiddling around with …
successfully unparent your child objects
as an maya beginner, i ran quite often into the problem that if i unparent an object it jumps to a weird location. the reason is quite simple: when you’re parenting the child “resets” its coordinates in relation to …
Remove Constraints: The Easy Way
Another little time saver for Maya: It can be very time consuming to find and remove a constraint in the Hypergraph or Outliner in a complex scene. A better way is to select the object with the constraint in …
changing the order of channels
i truly like maya, but the one of the more annoying limitations in an otherwise very flexible application is that it is not possible to change the order of channels. whenever i wanted to add a new attribute in …
Get Those Bonus Tools Running
Autodesk offers a cool set of bonus tools for Maya which you should definitely install as they extend the package by a lot of time savers in all areas. But the tricky thing is to get them running!
I had …
use construction planes to position joints
often you see rigging tutorials with a character that has its arms straightened out by 90 degrees to the body. this looks advantageous as it makes positioning joints very easy in a front view. but it is more practical …
preferring an angle
lately i encountered a little nuisance with the ik handle tool (rps) which confused me as a beginner in rigging. i’ll illustrate the situation as follows:
go to top view and draw three joints with grid snap (x) on. the …