good day tomorrow

VFX supervising tomorrow out at Treasure Island. I'll be creating a light probe, match moving and turning a warehouse exterior into a restaurant. Should be fun. I'll update with cool images.

Also, I've finally figured out all the peices for my fluid directionalLight manipulator. Took about two weeks longer than expected but learned a lot along the way.

I'll make the script available as soon as I cobble it all together.

Remote desktop access!

The cranky IT guy just got a lot of slack from me. I was able to remote access the graphics station. This is potentially huge. I can set up a fluid sim to cache and then set it off to render from home before going to sleep. Also - if working from home I can set up the render to take place at work so no more sending large QT files over Yousendit. Nice.

It was recently pointed out to me that all this can be done with a .bat file as well using render description files but I'll need to research this one a bit more.

Next up is the custom built render farm. Two pc (core i7) home builds connected to my main workstation. Managed by Autodesks backburner and started from home over the weekend. Much less stress on deadline.

When I get the .bat system worked out I'll produce a tutorial.

No fire on set so here you go

After messing around with Maya and fluid effects I decided to go with a 2d solution and busted out the After Effects and Particular (Peder Norby is Sweden's answer to Thomas Knoll...funny on so many levels.)

I think this works perfectly. I overthought this and spent a lot of time in 3d when AE was the obvious solution

matchmove results from GOT shoot

Here's some matchmoved results from the I (Almost) Got Away With It shoot.



I was on vacation and couldn't supervise but the crew (and director did great). Much easier than prior shows.

Setting locator color part 1: matchmover to maya workflow

My fluid directional light contorler is taking longer than expected.

In the mean time I'm addressing a problem with Match Mover to Maya workflow. Meaning the ability to visually distinguish which locators are associated with specific objects. ie. locators that represent a chair in the scene versus those that represent the floor or wall etc.

Eventually I hope to build this into a script that automatically sets locator colors based on key words. We'll see.

For now I've discovered the use of the "for in" loop to assign or change attributes in an array. In this instance it will be used to enable color override and to set a color value.

Here is a group of locators at the default color interface value of dark green (imagine they represent a group of locators aligned to the ground plane of a backplate.

Now after selected all the locators I run the following MEL

string $selectedlist[] = `ls -sl`;

string $currentLocator;

for ($currentLocator in $selectedlist)

{

setAttr($currentLocator + ".overrideEnabled", 1);

setAttr($currentLocator + ".overrideColor", 13);

}

This has the following effect on the locators.

As you can see the display color is now changed on all objects to red.

Ideally this functionality could be built on to set the colors for all locators upon opening a scene created by Match Mover but that's for another day.

I'll try and explain how the MEL works later (or not if I can't find the time).

new blog

alright. Starting a blog geared towards useful things I discover in Maya, After Effects and other areas of CG/VFX creation. It's going to be technical but I'll try and put some of the eye popping end product up when available.

I know you're all so EXCITED! Well I am too.

Next post will be a MEL script to create and link a directional light to the internal light of a Maya fluid container. Should be exciting!