Category Archives: Plug-ins & Scripts

automatic script sourcing on maya launch

if you have extended your maya with several mel scripts (if not, you certainly will one day!), it’s useful to source those automatically when launching maya, so you can access them right ahead instead of manually sourcing them whenever …

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base your pivot

another little script that extends my personal collection of mel scripts i have permanently installed: base pivot. it centers and drops the pivot point of the selected object(s) to the bottom. works perfectly stable; worth adding to a hotkey …

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a marking menu for selection masks

inspired by a gnomon tutorial lately i also wanted to set up my own selection mask hotbox. since i work with maya with a gui completely turned off, the usual selection masks aren’t accessible from the status line any …

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polyboost gets a boost

my beloved polyboost tool has just undergone a large upgrade and it’s more than worth installing it. the partial rewrite in c++ makes quite a difference and makes the tool even more powerful with dense objects. i’m just amazed …

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backup my files, maya!

one feature i loved in 3ds max was the fact that you could save an additional file of your work by automatically increment a suffix number. this is a useful backup feature i really miss in maya; but there’s …

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toggle backface culling

just to practice my mel scripting abilities a bit i extended my backface culling switching process to be a toggle so it can be turned on and off just with one hotkey. before i switched between backface culling on …

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fast rendering with faked gi: use lightrigger

you know it: global illumination looks fancy but is terribly slow and sometimes just not flexible enough for your needs especially when it comes to non-realistic renders. if you still want to profit from some of the advantages of …

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fed up with the bitmap path utility?

yes, i do hate the bitmap/ photometric paths utility in 3ds max, too. it’s just an annoying, slow, unusable tool. after years living with this inconvenient functionality i finally found a solution for my desperate needs: the “relink bitmaps” …

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a collection of time savers

edgechex gives you more control of chamfering edges, advoutline removes intersections from created outlines of selected spline shapes, twops adds two new snappers, polygonmap sets planar mapping of selected polygons and orient map by selected edge or by maximum/ …

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using layer blending with texture maps

since autodesk never integrated blending modes with material layers third party developers fill the gap: map layers allows you to blend multiple texture maps together using various blending modes including their opacity amount – just like in photoshop: screen, …

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