SVA Computer Art, Computer Animation and VFX hosts ThinkBox

SVA Computer Art, Computer Animation and VFX invites you Wednesday, February 19th at 7pm for a presentation from ThinkBox of Krakatoa and Xmesh for Maya.

Bobo Petrov, a technical developer and director for films such as Avatar, Tron: Legacy, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Superman Returns, will demonstrate different ways he uses these plugins in his feature film VFX pipeline.



Recently updated  particle rendering plug-in Krakatoa for maya now contains the Magma node editor

Bobo will also be showcasing ThinkBox's geometry caching plug-in Xmesh

SVA compute art is located at 133 West 21st Street, between 6th & 7th Ave., 3rd floor.
and the presentation will be at 7pm on the 19th !. 

I'm really excited about all the plug-in development for maya coming out of thinkBox.. All those times I said, "damn, I wish maya had that plug-in" .



for more info on SVA computer art
http://www.svacomputerart.com/


for more info on ThinkBox Software
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/

for more info on Krakatoa MY 2.0
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krakatoa-my-overview/

for more info on Xmesh
http://xmesh.thinkboxsoftware.com/

for more info on DeadLine
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/deadline/

Daryl Obert of Autodesk kicks off MAYA MONDAYS.

Big thanks to Daryl Obert of autodesk and his Maya Mondays with tips tricks how-tos and updates every monday, be sure to check out Daryl's blog on the area for his other informative postings.

I hope Daryl can keep this up.. sounds really good.  



http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/daryl/

---

Monday January 27th ( the first official monday for Daryl)

---

Monday February 3rd ( set driven keys) #2

---

Monday Feb 10th   Depth Of Field #3

---

Monday February : Render Layers , Render Passes , and Post. #4

---

Monday March 3rd : Textures

---

Monday March 10th

---

Monday March 17th :  Artist Janet Echelman  Net Sculptures Maya plug-in

---

Monday March  24th: BiFrost Attribute Tests from Igor Zanic

 http://www.igorfx.com/bifrost/

---

Monday April 1st : BiFrost Shader

---

Monday April 7th : inside the back of the  Autodesk NAB booth

---

Monday April 14th : Maya 2015 now available!
http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-maya/free-trial

---

Monday April 21st : Setting up an environment for VP 2.0 using recap etc

 

---

Monday May 12th :  M and E webinar  "controlling complexity with xgen in Maya 2015"
 MAY 20th

http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/pc/index?
webinar sign up



and in case you missed it.. it will be available for review here:
http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=452932&id=17148448

and the youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_6ApchKwjN8RomN0cLQQT74i1a6sAzKi

---

Monday May 19th :   XGEN index archive tool

---

Monday June 2nd :   XGEN  tube groom for long hair

---

Monday June 16th

 No video this week , but a shout out to the mental ray blog

 Lots of great info on this blog, take a look:-)

http://blog.mentalray.com/

---

Monday June 30th : XGEN Stray Hair

( from Daryl)
The two expressions I used are
Frequency:  stray() ? 1 : 10
Magnitude:  stray() ? 1.5 : .1

---

Monday July 14th : Maya IBL rendering

---

Monday July 28th  : Ocean Shader

---

Monday August 4th : Maya Subscription options

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/buy

---

Monday August 18th: XGEN improvements in 2015 Ext 1

---

Monday August 25th : XGEN  spline outputas curve

---

Monday October 20th : EXT 1 color picker

---

Monday October 27th : m2015 nParticle tip/workflow

---

Monday Nov 3rd : Bifrost wet Sand Effect

---

Monday Nov 10th Maya 2015 IBL bug workaround...
 http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/daryl/maya-monday---ibl-bug-workaround

---

Monday Nov 17th Maya 2015 - Deformer order

---

Monday Nov 25th nhair tips and tricks..

---

Monday Dec 10th nhair tips and tricks 2

---

Monday Dec 22nd Tips and Tricks with BlendShapes.

---

Daryl Obert Shares some tips n tricks from AU 2013

If you weren't able to attend Daryl's master class this year at Autodesk University , he was kind enough to put up a tips n tricks video based on his presentation

 I always find I pick up a few little things here and there..  here are some of my favorites:

• in panel view and trans manip hold shift and gesture in a direction you want to constrain movement in 
• in the attribute editor, using cntrl + LMB will move slow, cntrl + MMB will move medium, and cntrl + RMB will move fast..  ( this is different than cntrl and shift in the channel box)
• windows key and arrow left or right will dock your open app, up will maximize, down will minimize
• scene annotation in bonus tools

modeling tips




shelf tips




update ( jan 8th)   Creating the BG for the demo (Daryl is the king of these types of tricks)





4 of 5




5 of 5 Dynamics..

Dec 11th meeting recap

Thanks again to our presenters Mark and Kyle, and to Kathy of CADA and Cinesys-Oceana!

 Here is a link to Mark's blog in case you didn't quite catch everything he did.
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/marks

  main take away for me was:
      While the one-click buttons are great for transferring back and forth from maya to softimage, you may want to take the power back and use the cache manager from soft for porting particle info back to maya for best results..  and be sure to add rotatePP or any other special channels you might need back in maya that don't come across by default ( another good one is objectID if you are using multiple instanced objects) 


I definitely suggest taking a deeper look into zync for those of you that are interested.. I honestly do believe this is a game changer in our industry.  Every one wants it cheaper faster better.. ZYNC definitely helps in those categories.

https://www.zyncrender.com/



thanks again to everyone who came out to watch and participate and look forward to more of these in 2014 ( when we'll all be using maya 2015 )

-=s



( some bad iPhone photos from the event... )

3December User's group Meeting : December 11th

Last one of the year!
 Okay So I've got one last Users group meeting for you guys, and since its in December, it counts as a 3December Event..   get it,, 3 D ...




Mark Schonnagal is coming to show how to harness the power of softimage from maya  using  the interoperability tools between maya and soft.  Mark is the lead application engineer for Autodesk softimage.

---

Brian Drewes of ZYNC will be on hand to give a demo of their cloud based online rendering solution.  We've talked a lot about cloud based render and storage systems and ZYNC, and I'm eager to see a little more into what zync is,  and how it can ease the pain of render farms for small studios and artists.



Brian Drewes is the CEO and co-founder of ZYNC. With nearly 20 years experience as a producer and executive producer on the west and east coast on both commercials and feature films, Brian started ZYNC as a solution to allow boutique facilities and individual artists to utilize massive and powerful computing resources in an on-demand hourly fashion without needing any of the capital start up costs that come with building and maintaining a large render farm.

---

and

Kyle Raffile of ZERO VFX will be showing off some of their latest work for RAM trucks made with Maya and Vray and rendered with the help of the ZYNC platform.

Kyle Raffile is a CG Artist at Zero VFX. After graduating in 2009 and freelancing in NYC, he joined Zero VFX as a staff artist in 2011 and has worked on both national commercial spots and feature films.

Zero VFX:
Founded in Boston in 2010 by VFX industry veterans, Zero VFX provides the care and attention to clients of a boutique environment while delivering high end visual effects on numerous national TV commercials and feature films including "Here Comes the Boom", "Zookeeper", "The Way Way Back" and the forthcoming David O. Russell project "American Hustle". Zero's entire rendering pipeline is based on cloud computing and the scalable, on-demand power that ZYNC provides.

---

This meeting is going to be at the Woolworth Building down by city hall as hosted by NYU CADA!

Woolworth Building

15 Barclay Street - Room 430

NY, NY 10279

6:30pm to 9:30pm
please RSVP to :  nycmayausersgroup@gmail.com

View Larger Map

---

Refreshments and Technical Support Graciously provided by CineSys-Oceana

Autodesk Scripting and SDK learning channel

Not sure how long this youtube channel has been up ( maybe 3 months? )  , but looks pretty great for intro to scripting in Python , MEL, for maya  and xsi and motionbuilder.

 I havn't watched any of them yet, but they look promising...


 http://www.youtube.com/user/ScriptingSDKHowTos/videos



Introduction to Python Scripting in MAYA :

Part 1: Creating and Manipulating objects



Part 2: working with Selections and Constraints




part 3: Creating a scripted animation




part 4: Generating a user interface





part 5: Custom Attributes and Expressions

Quick Tip: Hypershade Icons toggle

By now I'm sure you're all using the node editor to create and work with your shaders in maya , but for those of you who are still using that clunky old  hypershade  ESC just posted a quick tip for toggling the icons in it to help speed things up..

 This is something I've been using forever , as it can make a huge difference in speed .. It seems that anytime you can tell the ui in maya to be quite, you get a big speed burst. 


 But, of course pre- Python in maya, the code I use is MEL .   so I thought I'd share it here. its super simple, and not much to it.. and of course you can add to it develop in further if you wish.

 code:

renderThumbnailUpdate (!`renderThumbnailUpdate -q`);



Just put that on your shelf and it works as a toggle to turn the hypershade icons off if they are on, and on if they are off.



I'll let ESC share their tip with you for using Python in maya to do the exact same thing.
 ( be sure to check out their other quick tips as they are also super helpful)








Python Code from ESC :

import maya.cmds as cmds
swatchState= cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate(q=True)
if swatchState == 0:
cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate (1)
print("\nSwatches turned ON")
else:
cmds.renderThumbnailUpdate (0)
print("\nSwatches turned OFF")