secret after effects settings

June 21, 2008

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 severe troubles rendering a 3 minutes short (on my vista sp1 laptop with 2gb of ram), [...]

Read the full article →

using the black hole

June 21, 2008

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 a traffic light in my upcoming short which needs some nice glowing effects on its lights. [...]

Read the full article →

the traffic light is alive

April 30, 2008

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 the pole, point-snapped joints on the upper light-”eyelid”, a little control interface for it with cluster, [...]

Read the full article →

lieutenant lou’s first smile

April 30, 2008

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 vertices is as satisfying. my first character face rig has just been completed and lt. lou [...]

Read the full article →

successfully unparent your child objects

April 30, 2008

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 its parent. now if you lock the channels of the child (what it i did, but [...]

Read the full article →

remove constraints: the easy way

April 25, 2008

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 the viewport, left-click the node in the channel box, select the name and copy it. now [...]

Read the full article →

changing the order of channels

April 25, 2008

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 an existing set of well-organized ones, it will just be added at the end of the [...]

Read the full article →

get those bonus tools running

March 31, 2008

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. the tricky thing is to get them running! i had some installation issues and as i digged through several forums i saw that a lot of [...]

Read the full article →

use construction planes to position joints

March 26, 2008

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 to use a default pose with more relaxed arms (same for legs, so don’t use [...]

Read the full article →

preferring an angle

March 26, 2008

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 three joints should be perfectly aligned this way now: as you know, this makes the ik [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →