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), because after effects constantly told me that it is running out of memory… it felt like the software was piling up all the rendered images into ram and released it when the render is finished. to get around this problem, hold the shift key, go to edit > preferences > memory & cache and you’ll be surprised to see a new entry in the drop down menu called ‘secret’: the most interesting setting is the one that you can clear the memory after a specific amount of rendered images: ‘disable layer cache’. i put in 15 and i finally could render my short without any problems.
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. because i’m rendering with renderman i can’t use the standard glow special effect, so i have to do that in post. but: how can i render out just the the parts of the lights which are covered by the metal surrounding? here’s the solution:
first, i created a render layer and added the green and the red light including the metal surrounding. now switch to the hypershade and create a lambert material, make it completely black and jump to ‘matte opacity’ and switch the matte opacity mode to ‘black hole’. now i selected the metal surrounding and put this new material on it.
if you want you could also throw a white lambert shader with diffusion set to 1 to all other objects if you don’t need the color information.
now i can just render out this render layer separately and use it in a compositing program like after effects or combustion using a specific blending mode like screen or overlay and blur it to have a nice, subtle light glow effect. here’s my final result:
sure, it would also be possible to render out a glow pass with the maya software renderer, but since i have attached some renderman attributes like the ‘subdiv scheme’ to my geometry, i’d run into troubles as the software renderer doesn’t understand those attributes at all (therefore rendering out a lowres geo). the black hole (i like the name) gives you a lot of flexibility and combined with the render layers it’s a little door opener for interesting render workflows.
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, a little skin painting, done – took me all just 4 hours, great! i can now also control the light intensity through the scale of my control interface, which comes in very handy as it also controls the light bulb material (ambient and incandescence) through driven keys. maya is really wonderful with all its nodes & attributes – just connect anything with whatever you like. here’s a portrait of the traffic light showing its sweetest side:
the only small issues i had was the handling of the lattice deformer which i had to separately point constrain to the pole’s topmost joint, i couldn’t just attach the lattice and the base at once. still a bit confusing, but it works perfectly fine now.
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 (the name of my character) can express all kind of emotions through my self made control interface which is basically a huge set of nurbs and clusters directly connected with attributes or driven by a key that control joints and blend shapes.
so everything is quite straightforward and – apart from the time i needed to accomplish the creation of the 3 dozens of blend shapes – the production was pretty hassle-free. i went knee deep into fancy details: i can even control the antenna transforms, the scale of the eye’s pupils and the rotation of the tongue. i know i won’t use all this in my upcoming short, but it was a great exercise to know what’s possible.
it’s time now to move forward and use my work in the 3d animatic i have to present next week at the vancouver film school, hoping to generate some smiles on the faces of the audience.
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 didn’t remember), the unparenting process will not function properly, as maya can’t set the original coordinates (thus relating its coordinates back to the world). so double check if you don’t have any channel locked (and/ or hidden) to assure that unparenting just as you’d expect. in general it is not advisable locking/ hiding channel for example during a rigging process: do this at the last possible moment, when you’re sure everything else works fine and you only want to clean things up.
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 paste the name in the ‘select by name’ entry field of the status line (switch to it if you didn’t do so). now it becomes selected and you simply hit delete on the keyboard and your constraint is gone.
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 list (therefore sorting by creation time). it would be so advantageous if changing the order would be possible like it is with the layers. until autodesk will add this as a new feature i finally found away to do this: simply open the maya ascii .ma file (close the file in maya!), search for the attribute you want to change the order of and simply cut and paste it to the place you want it to. ha! one more reason to stick to the good ol’ ascii file!
scared of doing this hack? then try out david walden’s attribute manager which is freely available on his site. just source the script, type attributeMan in order to let this window appear:
now play with your channel order at your heart’s content. as stated before, i really hope this functionality will be included in an upcoming version!
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 other users do have the same kind of problem after installation: the bonus tools menu just doesn’t show up at all. this is how i could fix it:
first copy the file bonusTools.txt in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MayaBonusTools2008\modules to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2008\modules. now open this file in a text editor and change the settings according to your operating system (create the folder if it doesn’t exit yet). i’m using windows vista, so it is:
+ bonusTools 2008 C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MayaBonusTools2008\BonusTools
if you start maya now, you can type in the mel command line:
bonusToolsmenu;
but i wanted to have this menu show up automatically; so open the userSetup.mel in C:\Users\yourUsername\Documents\maya\2008\prefs\scripts. if it doesn’t exist, create it. type in the same command as mentioned above and save it. i also recommend to turn on toggle menu style, so it only shows the entries dependent which mode you are in (like animation, polygons etc.). you’re done – enjoy the new & powerful features.
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 the ‘da vinci pose‘ as a default pose to rig), so they’ll have an angle like 45 degrees. this makes positioning the joints more difficult, but here’s where construction planes within maya come in handy.
so let’s assume you have your arm geometry visible in a front view, go to create > construction plane and enter the options window. set the size to 12 (or whatever size of units you need to surround the arm) and pole axis to xz. now rotate the plane to have the same angle as the arm and just make it live. this makes a grid on the plane visible so you can easily position your joints on this plane in a top view. you also may want to turn off the base grid in order to have only the construction plane grid visible: display > grid.
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 solver go crazy so you normally position the joints with a little bend so the ik solves correctly out of the box. you may think that you can just move the middle joint a bit up or down to have a slight angle, but if you try to add the ik solution, the three joints will straighten out, which surprised me.
the reason is that maya stores an initial preferred angle value when creating the joints. so basically the ik solution will straighten out the three joints again, even when i moved the middle joint around to create a slight angle. so you need to set the preferred angle again after you moved the middle joint to overwrite with a new value.
with the assume preferred angle you can check which value has been stored into your bones, so you may double check your rig when you set your preferred angle. setting a preferred angle in a rig is also very helpful to have an additional ‘backdoor’: if you select edit > select hierarchy and set preferred angle, you can save all the angles in your character’s default position. with assume preferred angle you can get the default angle back very easily. these kind of fallbacks are always welcome for animators in production phase.
