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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: Tricks
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 …
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 …
check list to save rendering time in maya
here’s a check list to go through in order to save rendering time:
render attributes: be sure you don’t have any unnecessary render attributes activated (shape node: render stats > cast shadows, receive shadows, motion blur, primary visibility, smooth shading, …
Posted in Maya, Rendering, Tricks
Tagged attributes, clipping planes, light links, Maya, render, render settings, surface materials, tesselation
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creating blend shapes after binding your character
usually, the head’s blend shapes of a character are done before the binding process. there’s a way that allows you do this after binding, it’s quite straightforward: select all faces to be used for the blend shapes of your …
mirroring blend shapes – impossible?
whenever you’re into creating a bunch of blend shapes for example for a face, you may wish to mirror certain face expressions instead of having to do the tedious and time-consuming work of moving around vertices again (and try …
ascii just saved my life
some minutes ago i was in a desperate mood: i just couldn’t open a certain maya file anymore, it just crashed right at the time when i tried to open it – did i lose all my work of …
creating a rim shader in maya
using the sampler info utility in maya (hypershade) allows you to receive information about the shading on a point of a surface; so if you want to create a rim shader in maya connect the facing ratio of a …