Kim Goossen's Procedural Modeling Youtube channel

Ok so the theme this week is plugs. I really wanted to share Kim's work. If you're interested in learning great fundamentals in procedural modeling and general Houdini fundamentals, this is an incredible resource. I've worked a little bit with Kim at EA a few years ago and gained a mountain of knowledge from him and other incredible talents in this discipline. If you want to build sustainable, scalable, and dynamic cities, props, characters, etc. This is an awesome place to start.

Here's a link to Kim's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0VQvtms-36ilCVgJQXEM_Q

Alex Forsythe Motionbuilder Python Tutorials

Another shameless plug!

So this set of tutorials is absolutely HUGE if you need to work in Motionbuilder and write python scripts like you would in other DCC applications. Alex does a phenomenal job teaching scripting in Motionbuilder and Python in general. This helped me a ton at work and I wanted to share it here.

Here's a link to Alex's website with his suite of tutorials. The production value is great and the pacing is awesome if you're learning for the first time.

http://awforsythe.com/tutorials

Unreal 4 Massive Collection of tutorials!

A friend from work found this really neat page that is a great collection of fantastic free official and unofficial tutorials for UE4.

Here's a link:
https://unreal-engine-4.zeef.com/tom.looman

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! :)

fxphd

Along with sites like CgSociety, CgCircuit, Digital Tutors, etc. I stumbled upon a cool site that has really neat VFX tutorials and classes that you can take to advance your skillset. It's called fxphd and focuses on VFX. I like it because it has some nice stuff for pipelines and production.

Here's a link:
https://www.fxphd.com/fxphd/courseInfo.php

NVIDIA Turbulence/ Unreal 4 Particles and Vector Fields

So I've seen this technology evolve over the years and it looks like we're getting closer and closer to seeing GPU accelerated particles becoming easy to access in an engine. In this case NVIDIA's APEX Turbulence ended up turning into NVIDIA Turbulence and now evolved into Unreal Engine 4 Vector Fields. it's getting easier to access and experiment with this tech for any kind of high fidelity particle animation or fluid animation in real time. I've talked about the Titan's real time fluid effects that was shown earlier this year but there is something really mesmerizing about Vector Fields and I wanted to definitely share what I've found thus far. If you happen to have a copy of Unreal 4, definitely check it out. It's 20 bucks a month and you don't necessarily have to pay every month if you don't want to.

Hit the jump for video demonstrations and tutorials on how to get started with Unreal 4 and NVIDIA Vector fields now:

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

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!

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:

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.