March 25th maya users group meet up

Yes, we are back, and it's a new year, and time for a meeting. ( finally) 

 Sorry about the late notice, but I hope you guys still make it down to SVA Wednesday night, March 25th   to come visit with MPC and Zync. 

 Artists from MPC NY are going to show off some behind the scenes of their latest super bowl commercial "Fable" featuring the tortoise and a very hairy hare.   MPC's fur grooming and rendering tools are pretty amazing and they are willing to show some of how it all works and how they create such amazing work with it. 

ZYNC cloud rendering..  

Todd Prives from ZYNC is going to fill us all in on what is going on in the unlimited power of Cloud Based Rendering using the Google cloud platform..  Already used by countless studios on block buster films, the ZYNC render manager creates an effortless portal to pretty much the most powerful machines you can even dream of.  

Graciously hosted by SVA computer art !!

Meeting is planned on starting at 7:30 and run to about  10:30 

SVA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

301C, 3rd Floor

133 West 21st Street

between 6th & 7th Ave.

see you there !!

-=s

CRASHING MAYA - tutorials tips and tricks from Alex Cheparev

 Local Artist and Modeler extraoridnair and teacher at SVA Alex Cheparev is giving back with  a series of tips tricks and tutorials on his YouTube Channel.

 Check out his page, and be sure to hit up on techniques you'd like to see him cover. 

I particularly like his method for fixing poles on spheres to make all quad models, but be sure to subscribe and collect all his videos, and the ones to come.






another example from his channel

( polygon wedge tool)

An Evening with Joe Letteri at the Museum of the Moving Image

SCREENING & LIVE EVENT

Museum of the Moving Image

36-01 35 Avenue / Astoria, NY

Visual Effects Master: An Evening with Joe Letteri and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Wednesday, February 11, 7:00 p.m.

Followed by a screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 3-D

Presented in partnership with the Visual Effects Society, New York

Five-time Academy Award winner Joe Letteri will give an exclusive behind-the-scenes presentation of his work on the Oscar-nominated Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Letteri is one of the world’s leading visual effects artists. The emotional richness and complexity of the apes in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is just the latest achievement, along with his stunning work on The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in a truly remarkable career that earned him his Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects on Avatar, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and King Kong. He also received a special Technical Achievement Award from the Academy for the subsurface scattering technique that brought Gollum to life. In this very special program, Letteri will present work on Dawn and other films, including content created exclusively for this event that will provide an inside look at the work of Weta Digital, the New Zealand company that was founded by Peter Jackson and is widely considered to be the premier visual effects studio.

This one-hour presentation will be followed by a screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 3-D

 (Dir. Matt Reeves. 2014, 130 mins. Dolby Digital 3-D. With Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Andy Serkis.)


Tickets: $20
NYC Maya User Group members receive 20% off tickets with the code VFX


purchase tickets and make reservations at the Museum Of Moving Image website:

Maya Extension 1 + SP 5 now available

Looks like its mostly bug fixes... lots and lots of bug fixes

 check your subscription page under Product Enhancements


and it is a patch install, so just run it over your current version of Extension 1 

Maya 2015 Extension 1 is NOW AVAILABLE !!! .

Maya 2015 Extension 1 is NOW AVAILABLE !!!
get it while its hot.

http://area.autodesk.com/products/features/maya

Maya customers on Autodesk® Subscription have access to Extension 1 for Autodesk® Maya® 2015 software
This extension for Maya provides you with new tools and workflow enhancements, helping you get more done in less time. Some of the features you should be excited about include: an all-new Color Management system, new performance profiler tool, and a series of modeling and workflow productivity enhancements.

New features

Color Management
A completely new color management system that helps you preserve your creative intent throughout lighting and rendering workflows with more accurate color reproduction within Maya windows and editors, as well as frames rendered through the NVIDIA® mental ray® renderer.
A simple linear workflow is available out of the box, and you can customize it to match your color pipeline

Includes support for EXR floating-point data and for the Autodesk® Color Management component (SynColor), the OpenColorIO open source project, and the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), which enables consistent color-safe handling of imagery across The Foundry's NUKE® software, Adobe® Photoshop® software, Autodesk® Flame® family of products, and other applications to help ensure color compatibility throughout the studio pipeline.

Third parties can take advantage of the SDK to implement support for the Maya Color Management system in other renderers and applications that work with Maya.






Performance Profiler
The new Performance Profiler helps technical directors gauge, measure, and debug the performance of individual nodes, character rigs, and Maya scenes.

Take advantage of a graphical interface that enables performance measurement and graphing for dirty propagation, evaluation, deformations, rendering, Qt events, XGen instancing, and Bifrost simulations.

A robust API gives you the option to extend the Performance Profiler for use with custom tools and plug-ins.

Productivity Enhacements

We made a number of general workflow enhancements that you identified as high priority, in an effort to make your everyday tasks more efficient and save you time.

• Expanded wireframe color choices ( no longer dependent on overrides !!!!!! ) 
• Per-menu keyboard shortcut to repeat the last command  ( press MMB over  a menu) 
• Object visibility toggling  ( h for multi object toggle, be sure to check the prefs!!) 
• Color coding in the channel box to reflect various key states ( this is awesome ) 
• Performance improvements and multi-UV tiling support for OpenSubdiv 
• Enhancements to the Multi-Cut tool
• Further integration of the Modeling Toolkit
• New custom pivot workflows ( takes getting used to , but is worth it ) 

August 27th Meet Up Recap

First off I want to thank our presenters Lee Fraser , James Dick and Will Frazier.  As well as Autodesk, and Great Eastern tech for providing the space and refreshments.


 Some quick notes from Lee's presentation:

Probably the biggest thing to look forward to in  Maya  2015 ext 1 is the new color management. This is going to be a huge leap forward!.  The profiler is great for figuring out what's wrong with your scene..the next step is figuring out how to fix what's wrong.  

 Bifrost and Xgen keep improving everyday.

 Lee briefly mentioned the "h" key will now be for toggling visibility, and using the middle mouse button on a menu to repeat last action in an effort to make it more "artist friendly".  I'm still not sold on the "h" key as it will globally hide or show all your selected objects. So its really only toggling off your last selected object.. Keep an eye out for accidentally hitting that key.

I'm actually excited for the new wire frame coloring options. As I tend to stay away from using display overrides for coloring my control curves ( display layers break this) .

The planned release for Maya 2015 Ext 1 is September 10th 


Also ,, Face Shift  is looking pretty cool and if you are into low-budgetish motion capture. It looks to be a great option.
http://www.faceshift.com/

 James and Will showed off the job they had to pull off from start to finish in about 30 days . AllState360 and really delved into some of the things you have to do to get that quality of work done in that little of time. In a word. Make a great track, and trust it will all work in the end.  Awesome work and super cool to see all the things that went into the making of.

http://www.framestore.com/work/allstate-360

In honor of the two presentations I made a quick ( like I spent maybe 5 minutes) making a house and covering it with bifrost rain..

AUGUST 27th 2014 : Maya Users Group Meet !

I know its been a while, but hopefully everyone has been enjoying this summer weather. But now its time for work.. Come meet up with your fellow artists and check out some of what's new in Autodesk and Maya technology from Lee Fraser. Also, from Framestore, James Dick will be showing some behind the scenes of some of the more interesting challenges he's faced in commercial production.

 Refreshments are graciously provided by Great Eastern,

  Please be sure to RSVP to :  nycmayausersgroup@gmail.com

New York Autodesk Office

6:00 to 9:30

Wednesday, August 27th  

6:00 PM - 9:30 pm

38W 21st Street, 9th Floor

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Lee Fraser , Technical Specialist of Autodesk. Will be presenting a post siggraph recap and run down of some of the new stuff in Maya, and  take some QnA. 

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

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James Dick, CG Supervisor for Framestore studio will be showing off some of their latest work and giving a little look into the making of some of his favorite commercials.

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