More scripts! Move and rotate camera to face a face

It's an impaled camera!!
Sometimes when I UV, I really wished there is an option to move the camera so it is perpendicularly pointing at the face I'm unwrapping, while centred at the face's centre.

This will help when UV planar project from the axis does not yield and fiddling around trying to get the camera perfect sucks.

Unfortunately there don't seem to be there by default, so after a day of planning and scripting, here it is!

Have to revert to A Level maths mechanics about the centre of mass of a lamina and a spreadsheet to plan and check the values before I started scripting, but it's done!

All you have to do is:

  1. Select a face
  2. Edit 1 word of the script to the name of the camera you want to move
  3. Run the whole script
Few flaws though:
  • You will have to dolly out to view the face 
    • The viewFit command (hotkey f) sometimes messes up the face centring
    • I haven't got around to implementing something that translates the camera's local z until the face is fully in view
  • Orthographic cameras might have a very clipped view 
    • Require another camera to translate it

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debugging Maya using Visual Studio Code

Image
I've been testing debugging Maya Python scripts lately. Mostly focusing on free IDEs or editors such as PyCharm. So far this is one requires less setup in my opinion. This is mostly based off the remote python debugging functionality described here : Download and install  Microsoft's free Visual Studio Code Install the official Python Extension  Download ptvsd package as a zip Extract the ptvsd folder into your Maya scripts folder Open Maya and run (updated! Thanks  Luciana !) import ptvsd ptvsd.enable_attach( address =( '0.0.0.0' , 3000 ), redirect_output = True ) Back in VSC, switch to Attach (remote debug) in the debug configurations and start it The editor should now look something like this You are now ready to debug.  Note: here is the settings I use in launch.json Add break points, run your code and it should stop and populate the debug section of Visual Studio code when it hits a break point...
Read more

Vray Non-Photorealistic shading Splur

Image
Been rendering the Maya ramp shader using Vray for the lighting and rendering test for major project animation. May be considering using other renderers as so far I feel Vray is not really designed for non-photorealistic rendering.e.g. the edge cut off is still softer than I wanted it to be. I tried to imitate this render setup but in Maya but have been unsuccessful so far, the VRay materials does not seem to map the colours correctly on the lightMtl or the geometry shadow color and fall off does not get affected at all by the ramp shader. One of the first tests piping outColor of ramp to VRay materials I may investigate further into geometry shadow falloff in VRay shaders later on but we'll see how others go.
Read more

Shotgun! Feast! And small things

Image
Lately for major project, I have started looking into the Shotgun using the accounts given to start looking at pipeline. The artist permissions pre-set had very limited control, obviously, but I was kindly given access to a managers permissions account which I did some test setting up assets, shots, assigning schedules and customising pages. More work is still to be done with experimenting and planning our pipeline as well as starting to layout the various pieces of our project into Shotgun. In the mean time, I emailed Greg Culp, the lead lighting artist for the short film 'Feast', for some advice on flat looks for lighting and rendering. To my delight, he managed to reply and give valuable help for us which we will surely be looking into during look dev.
Read more