Mari 2.6

Working at LucasFilm has exposed me to a lot. One thing that I learned about that I didn't see much of at EA is The Foundry products. In particular the tool that stands out is Mari. I've taken some time to talk about Quizel's dDo and there's also Substance Painter out there which both handle surface painting beautifully but Mari handles surface painting so well, I really need to share it.

For starters Mari 2.6 supports GLSL which allows you to author surfaces on shaders familiar to those in modern game engines. If the shader out of the box does not quite match up, you can write a custom shader in Mari that fits your engine better using their Custom Shader API. Your shader will still be able to support all of Mari's great authoring features which allow artists to really build accurate surface materials that will translate nicely to an engine. Mari's shader engine will soon be able to also simulate rendering engines like Arnold and VRay as well.

Another thing that really speaks to Mari's power is it's robust Python API and terminal mode. You can write batch scripts and pipeline scripts in Mari to process assets through Mari without having to even open the UI, freeing the artists from doing any sort of monotonous tasks by hand. It's really easy to write python scripts for Mari too. There are already scripts out there to transfer Mari assets into Maya and back.

One of my favorite features of Mari at the moment is it's particle texture transfer system. Basically you can take a super high resolution film quality asset and overlay it on a game resolution equivalent and transfer all of the detail from one mesh to the other. This is similar to Zbrush and Mudbox's detail transfering except for surfaces. You could transfer surface detail from a really high resolution mesh with tons of UDIMs to a game resolution mesh with one UV map and get the proper diffuse, specular, normal, roughness, etc. maps for your engine. All in all, this software is really great and I highly recommend it.

Hit the jump for some video demonstrations of Mari 2.6

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

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:

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.