Casey Hupke asked an interesting question today: “how can I get a Color SOP to automatically update its node color to match the picked color?” This reminded me of some other pipeline work I’d done in the past to customize existing nodes in Houdini; for example, adding a few spare Read more…
I’ve implemented most of my planned pipeline, finally. Just want to do a brief walkthrough to brag about features to show what this set of tools is capable of doing. The pipeline uses symlinks to allow each asset or shot to exist inside its own self-contained Maya project workspace, while Read more…
I recently took a staff position at the up-and-coming Gentleman Scholar Studios in Santa Monica. I’ll be their “Technical Director,” which more or less means I’ll be doing more of the same old scripting, lighting and materials. Which is totally fine with me… these guys are gonna be big. Also on Read more…
I am a huge advocate of using shared render layers in a file referencing pipeline. It’s probably the only reasonable way of allowing lighters, animators, riggers and FX artists to work on shots and assets simultaneously. That being said, it isn’t without its weaknesses (many of which I talked about in an earlier post). The latest one I encountered happens with scenes with TONS of objects… not necessarily a high polygon count, but just lots and lots of individual DAG nodes. Take a look… (more…)
As promised, a useful post! And probably a long one.
As far as rendering goes, the problem that I see people running into more often than anything else is render layers mysteriously breaking, especially when file referencing is involved. The symptoms are typically either objects disappearing or Maya simply being unwilling to switch to a specific render layer, claiming in the Script Editor that there are “overrides to a node in a missing reference” or something to that effect. A lot of less experienced or just less technical types will try to solve the problem by either importing their references into the scene (which is rarely a good idea), or by screaming obscenities (which is exhilarating but ineffective). There is a better way to get your scene to render with no problems, and be able to use file referencing. The trick is to use shared render layers properly, only allow certain edits to your references in your final scene, and make sure that your references are clean.