Meanwhile, Joe is working on...

A milestone in creating expressions in my own maya script editor, along with previous features of splitting and deleting panes. Oh yeah and it will transfer your current scripting tabs over to the script editor. In other news on coding this, I've been looking into the logging library and creating debug messages using those, which I found pretty funky as I can turn them on or off by setting the severity limit.

Almost forgot about the blog, my bad. Lately in our Major project, one of the areas I have been contributing to is the modelling of our environment asset, notably establishing the scale with proxy geometry which are all done in Maya. Scene environment work in progress The general proxy geometries of the steps, floors, doors, windows, etc. were quickly modelled. Then came the railing and the lamp-pillar at the start and end of every flight. Quick concept art of the railings and lamp-pillar that I work from, provided by our concept artist Paris Jones The pillars were first approached, modelled and UV'd. To offer the director a choice, I modelled the pillar in both of rectangular or cylindrical profiles of each individual pillar element so we can mix and match to formulate the final geometry. Using Maya 2015's UV tools felt a little better than previous versions e.g. able select UV shells in the UV texture like you would with faces, edges, etc was nice. Howeve

I've been looking more into Shotgun software for our production recently, setting up assets, task templates, shots and experimenting with other customisation features for pages to get a feel for the software more. From what I experienced so far, this is a very flexible system, very customisable hence some other people have no clue on how to set things up. Created a task template for helping quickly populating production assets list It is centred around assets, which can only be created by the manager account, which can have various files and attributes assigned to it and from that, it can be linked to other production elements such as shots, schedules and the review system within Shotgun. Populating assets and shots in Shotgun, yet to associate them with each other Currently, both the artist and manager accounts cannot setup Shotgun Desktop app meaning at the moment, Shotgun used more in a sense as a web-app rather than a full integrated system for production.

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.

Just quick adjustments the the force fields (turning down turbulence and keying various field's magnitudes) and changes to the custom aim expression/script. Still not convinced on the general behaviour of the butterflies, I think I will write my own flocking system to deal with them. At the current state, they are most useful for long shots and when the butterflies may need to collide with objects due to the use of nParticles. I think creating a custom flocking system will be to mainly provide a more realistic flight behaviour, with less sharp changes of direction which is an artifact of the current solution and also to allow for butterflies to follow and go to certain positions defined by the user. At the current moment I am unsure of how to do such things with nParticles and expressions.

Did some really quick render test today with Mental Ray and Maya's ramp shader, definitely an improvement in terms of hardness of the edges over V-Ray. Soft edges can also be created too.

Continuation of pursuit for a more powerful and functional script editor from the university specialist project last year, I present the first look at JSE, or Joe's Script Editor. Yeah the name was definitely super cool, yeah. I have a lot of features lined up, including ideas from improving the script editor specialist project in the 2nd university year of study, including: Split panes (initial proof of concept complete) Opening and saving script behaviour just like in a normal text editor Re-written code execution procedures to overload the default one Vim style command line to do things New right click menus Integration with the existing scrip editor's preferences Some cool help to go with using it This is a personal project at the moment but I may consider it for the innovations project during this final university year. When I complete it to a good enough of a standard, I am thinking of proposing this to Autodesk as a candidate for replacing their existing