Maya to Unreal Plugin

Shameless plug alert! I actually had a chance to play around with this plugin that allows you to sort of live link Maya to Unreal. You can hook up the camera from Maya to the UE4 editor and send object from your Maya scene directly to UE4 and back using serial ports and good timing :)

Hit the jump for links to the source and a demo video...

Maya Plugin Goodness

I wanted to share a few Maya plugin resources that I've stumbled upon recently. Most of these have been around and you've probably seen them already but in case you haven't, here are some that I've found useful recently:

http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/maya-plugins-10134947
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/plugin/prattractnode

Feel free to add to this list in the comments. I appreciate all the resources I can get! :)

Maya 2015 Extension 1 has some really nice improvements

As if Maya 2015 wasn't jam packed enough with new features. It looks like Extension 1 has some really cool added features. Here are some that stood out to me.

• Performance Profiler. At first I thought this would be a simple ui with some real time feedback on Maya's performance but it turns out to be way more robust. You can now easily spot choke points during any process and the profiler will identify the exact maya action that's sucking up your performance. This is great if you want to optimize a scene.
• Send to feature is now extended to game engines. The really awesome send to feature that lets you send a scene from one package to another now extended to engines. Now you can take an asset from maya and in the click of a button, send it straight to Unreal.
• Modeling toolkit fully integrated. It looks like the modeling toolkit has usurped a lot of the obsolete modeling tools in Maya proper now.
• Cloud import export. This one seems pretty cool. You can upload content directly to a server. I'm curious to see this feature progress.
• Color Management. This one is really great. You can transfer your color information from compositing tools like flame into Maya and the viewport will properly update the color scheme of your scene to match the tool that you originally set your color values in. 

Hit the jump for video demonstrations of these tools in action!

PyCharm and Maya

This was a little bit overdo so I wanted to make sure to talk about PyCharm a little bit. I haven't had a chance to fully use this IDE like Eclipse and Visual Studio. I can say that from initial testing, I really do like PyCharm and I think that it is a great option for tech artists when writing scripts for their DCC apps and for Python programming in general. Note that I am also comparing from a Windows perspective and from a pricing perspective. I notice that Linux users tend to lean toward Eclipse over other software partially because it supports multiple languages, compatible with multiple platforms, and free :).

Hit the jump for some video overviews and some links to setting up PyCharm with Maya 2013. Also I'll provide a brief comparison of Eclipse, Visual Studio, and Pycharm.

Autodesk Scripting and SDK Learning Channel

I like to bookmark as many cool resources for digital art and programming as I can and I am more and more impressed with Youtube these days. Particularly Autodesk's use of Youtube to upload their latest SDK related tutorials as they make them. If you're into scripting and you use Autodesk packages like Maya, Max, SoftImage, Motionbuilder, etc., you should definitely subscribe to this channel! There is a lot of great content for beginners and experienced scripters alike. They are made using the latest versions of the software that you'll be working with. There's also a nice emphasis on game development with these tutorials so that's another plus if that is your industry.

Here's a link:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ScriptingSDKHowTos

New features in Maya 2015

It's that time of the year where Autodesk starts to announce all of the new stuff that's coming with the their next installment of all of their software. Maya has seen some really great changes that I'm excited to play with ranging from modeling and rigging to vfx and rendering. Some of the most exciting features are Bifrost and Viewport 2.0 finally being fully featured with all aspects of Maya!

Hit the jump for a breakdown and the video presentation that Autodesk released which demos all of these great new features.

Joe Alter's LipService w/LBrush 6.0

I wanted to talk a little bit about Joe Alter's more recent tool LipService and LBrush. As a side note, I absolutely loved Shave and a Haircut and was really excited to find the Joe Alter decided to tackle a new problem such as muscle deformation. You can see in the pictures below the major difference between regular skinning and the results that you can get from LBrush. What I love about this workflow is that it allows you to sculpt the model with each pose and the blends between deformations interpolate very nicely with each other. The results are fantastic and I see huge potential in applying this in real time applications too!

Check out the link to the main site to get more information:
http://lbrush.com/index.htm

Hit the jump for video demos and more samples...

Visual Studio as a Maya Python IDE

I already love to use Visual Studio for C++ plugin development but when it came to python tool development, Visual Studio used to lack a lot of the features that I genuinely enjoyed in Eclipse. However, thanks to Jos Balcaen, there are amazing new plugins available with Visual Studio's Python tools that allow Visual Studio to have all of the fun perks that Eclipse has as a Maya Python IDE. These plugins are available for Visual Studio 12 or higher. I'm using 12 in this picture with Maya 2014. It works really great and the workflow to connect Visual Studio to Maya is nearly identical to Eclipse. This is a really great deal especially if you're a big Visual Studio nut and want to use Intellisense or Visual Assist to debug your python tools. This is especially sleek if you're primarily using Windows and of course if you can afford a license :D.

If you have Visual Studio 12 or higher, you can set it up as a Maya Python IDE using this link:
http://josbalcaen.com/maya-python-visual-studio-2012/

Currently, I'm doing an audit between Visual Studio, Eclipse, and PyCharm to see which IDE fits best for my needs. Right now it looks like if you only care about python development, just use PyCharm. It's a really excellent Python IDE in general, arguably better than the other two for Python development. If you want a full fledged multi-language IDE to develop Python and C++ tools for Maya or what not and you only use Windows, go with Visual Studio. If you need something FREE, open source, cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac), and multi-language and you're willing to put in a little bit of extra effort, go with Eclipse for sure.

Hope this information is useful. Let me know if there is any other IDE out there that can give these options a run for their money and I will research that as well!

Houdini Engine is out!

This is huge news for Houdini/Maya users! Houdini now has their back end exposed as a stand alone engine that can be interfaced by other major CG applications like Maya and Unity. It's in its testing phase so it's free to test until it goes beta. This is really big especially for procedural nuts who love the way Houdini handles VFX and procedural modeling. Basically you can create your digital asset in Houdini and directly interface said asset in Maya or Unity directly without having to bake anything out or figure out some clever pipeline trick to see your work show up in the other applications. Now you can literally merge to power of Houdini and power of Maya seamlessly!

I'm really excited about this and I'm jumping on it immediately to see what I can come up with using this new potential workflow.

Hit the jump for resources on how to set up the engine along with demonstrations and to see a video of a digital asset working in Maya from Houdini.

Maya 2014 LT is out!

Really great news coming from Maya these days. Now for indie game companies who want to make great assets for their games but can't afford Maya comes Maya 2014 LT. This is pretty much a stripped down version of Maya that left all of the new and old game related tools like the Directx11 viewport and HumanIK rig. There is one bonus however that comes with this version. The new big thing from Maya is the node based DX11 shader editor (seen above). Rather than write out your code, you can set up the logic via nodes like a polished shader editor in a top engine. The great thing is that at the end, Maya will optimize and export out your node setup as a shader file so you can apply it to your respective game engine now!

This is huge to hear from Autodesk and I'm really excited to use it. The shader editor is currently the only feature that you can only get with the LT package so it's worth a shot to give it a quick look to see how it all works. Unfortunately, you loose big stuff like Maya scripting with this version of Maya which I think is a huge loss. A big draw to this program is that to get a license, you just need to pay 50 bucks a month for it like a rental. I'm assuming this also means that when a new version of Maya comes out, you can switch over.

Hit the jump for a trailer video and the feature set comparison between Maya 2014 and Maya 2014 LT.

Tutorial: How to set up an automatic overlap joint chain in Maya with Python

I found that when rigging characters and props, one thing that always impressed me in demo reels and in interactive scenarios is the use of real time dynamics in the Maya viewport. A lot of possibilities open up when you can grab a control rig and drive a simulation with your mouse in real time! I noticed that in Motion Builder, this kind of simulation comes with the sample rigs for free and I always wanted to try to figure out a way to get real time secondary motion in Maya for things like hair, cloth, and other loose items.

I found a way to achieve this a while back and I've always wanted to make a tutorial for everyone to follow to do the same thing. The main issue of course is that there are a good amount of steps to make one simulation driven joint chain so naturally, you would want to script this out. This tutorial will go over how to create the rig in Maya and it will also go over how to script this process out in python so that you can simply select the base of a joint chain and automatically make it dynamic.

Hit the jump for the entire tutorial:

Beginning stages of making digital robotic arm

This is the beginning stage of a robotic arm module model in Maya. I got the blueprints from the instruction manual of the robotic arm that I bought online. One of my goals for my arduino is to control a robotic armature via python serial port. I'd like to drive the arm with a digital rig. The hardware of choice is the Robotic Arm-Edge that I bought here:

http://www.amazon.com/OWI-OWI-535-Robotic-Arm-Edge/dp/B0017OFRCY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376881135&sr=8-1&keywords=robotic+arm

I'm really excited to have a digital controller in Maya or Houdini drive this physical asset.

Maya Python for Games and Film

I highly recommend any tech artist to buy this book. If you want to write python tools for Maya, this goes over all of the fundamentals and advanced techniques for you to be coding at a professional level.

Here's the official website:
http://www.maya-python.com/

You can buy a copy on Amazon for 43 bucks:
http://www.amazon.com/Maya-Python-Games-Film-Reference/dp/0123785782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375657664&sr=8-1&keywords=maya+python

Set up Eclipse with Maya 2014!

It's my second year using Eclipse as a Maya Python IDE. Thanks to Tyler Good and Ryan Trowbridge for inspiring me to do it. This time around, I went ahead and grabbed Eclipse Keplar with the Dark Juno theme to better match my Autodesk products.

Hit the jump if you're interested in setting up Eclipse with Maya yourself. I can add some links that can help.