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...

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 ...

Been trying to simulate a flock/crowd of butterflies using Maya nParticles and instancing a simple animated geometry. So far I had to add a better butterfly pointing vector as the default set is limited, butterflies do not pitch or dive steeply which the most usable default option available, aim by velocity, does. I had to write a custom expression to get the butterfly to get them to fly flatter. Wasn't too pleased with the result at the moment, looks like a mess, especially the flapping which does not relate to the speed or change of direction of the butterflies. Also, as expected, they behave like a bunch of particles, which is random enough for shots such as when they are collecting underneath the umbrella, obviously needs more tweaking for that.

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.

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: Select a face Edit 1 word of the script to the name of the camera you want to move 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 loca...

Time for lightmapping the pesky meshes. The guides I'm going for are: 128 maps for the bigger environmental pieces 64 maps for the bigger props, maybe 128 in some 32 maps for the tiny props New set of UV for light map, copying from original texture UV then cutting them up more 2 to 3 pixel padding or spacing between each UV island, I'll go into more detail on how I do this automatically later If neighbouring faces is angled around 60 degrees or more, the UV edge between the faces will be split All islands fit in the UV space from 0 to 1 in U and V axis Video series I used by WorldofLevelDesign for light mapping principles, simple and short. He uses Maya too but I have my own twists on things  My personal, more intuitive setup for the UV grid for 64px lightmap resolution (right click on the UV grid icon) Mainly use edge selection in the UV to cut rather than rumbling about with the mesh trying to cut edges After all the islands are cut...