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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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Category Archives: Maya
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 …
3ds max vs. maya
there’s a very interesting discussion going on over at autodesk’s area where users are comparing 3ds max and maya. luckily there’s not much of the usual flaming going on and most of the comments try to be objective, so …
orienting joints
orienting joints of a skeleton after positioning them in a character’s mesh is extremely important. without double checking them you’ll experience a lot of troubles as soon as you are playing around with your rig. theoretically if you don’t …
replacing shape nodes
you may ask what’s the advantage of replacing shape nodes in maya since it doesn’t make sense in the first place. but doing so can be enormously helpful when you need to access specific joints or clusters in a …
problem geometry? try obj export!
they happen eventually, for sure: these famous ‘mysterious’ problems. i had this case lately – whenever i wanted to select the mesh geometry of a character i’m working on, maya crashed! it worked perfectly fine before… and this all …