New Adventures

Well, After 6 years at Eurocom it's all come to a end.  It's a shame because there was some truly brilliant artists and programmers there.  It's also exciting times.   I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.  Onwards and upwards.

Maya Rig Builder

A few years ago I stumbled across a paper by Bungie detailing their metaData structure they used to track complex data in Maya and build better tools.  At the time at Eurocom we were struggling with the shear amount of data we had started to produce with next gen content.  Rigs had become more complex, we were doing 4 projects each with different character requirements.  Cartoon style rigs, biped, quadruped and monster style dead space rigs.  All our tools had to work with these variants.  The paper seemed like the answer to our problems.

So I wrote a metaData API at home and brought it into Eurocom and tried to hook it into our rig builder code.  At the time we were transitioning to python from MEL and we had bit's of code all over the place.  The metaData API enabled us to bring OO design to the rig.  It was a pain to retrospectively hack into the MEL calls, but it was worth it.  It's been a few years now.  The rig is still MEL with callbacks that fill the metaData structures and set the metaData properties.  Some of it is python, it's evolving every day and new modules are really seeing the benefit.

The concept is now in a lot of our tools outside of Rigs.  The environment asset pipeline is carrying metaData, which in turn is getting output via our internal tools and making it into the engine.  It's a pretty sweet system and is a lot like Maya's assemblies feature that came in 2013.5.

I've been digging around in my laptop and found an old UI mock up for my Rig Builder I use at home.  It's based on my metaData API that I've evolved separately.  Perhaps one day I'll be able to release these tools.

Getting PyCharm to play nice with mayapy.exe

I've started to get frustrated with wing IDE as it's laking features of late. Eclispe is very good but it's very hard to get into and setup remote debugging. So enter PyCharm. It's actively being developed and has come a long way in a very short period of time.

The 1st thing you will notice is that you can't add mayapy as the interpreter. You have 2 options on windows. If your on Vista or Win 7 the you can add a symbolic file link to mayapy in the bin folder. If your on XP then you can try this .cmd hack to fool PyCharm.

The .cmd trick
Add a file in the maya bin dir called python.cmd

inside the file add the following lines of code

@echo off
mayapy.exe %*

In PyCharm add this python.cmd as the interpreter. This should do the trick. But I have had this fail on occasions.

python.exe sybolic link
open up the cmd console in Vista/Win7. Alter this line to your maya bin dir

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Maya2012\bin"

then type

mklink python.exe mayapy.exe

you should have what looks like a shortcut named python.exe in the bin directory. Now in PyCharm you can add this as your python interpreter.

This in my opinion is a bug, after all wings and eclipse don't require this step! but for now, it's all we have.

Color Wheels

The amount of times we're sat at the Mundy Arms discussing colour during breaks is... well, a few times. But nether the less it's an interesting subject for a artists and TD's alike. This link quickly recaps the 3 main colour wheels in wide spread use today and relates them back to a 4 colour primary wheel that more closely represents how we bio-mechanicaly interpret wave lengths.

Color Wheels

Shareaholic

I'm moving away from facebook and more towards Buzz and Google Reader. This extension for chrome seems to be interesting so I'm testing it's Blogger options. If your seeing this then it's worked!

Shareaholic for Google Chrome - Google Chrome extension gallery

Becoming a Dad (a blogging excuse)

We'll it's been a long while, I've not had much chance to update any of my home work since my 1st post back in 2008. A lot has happened since then. I'm now a proud father, and it's only now that I'm getting time to think about writing on this blog. It's great being a Dad. Something I always thought was for other men. I wasn't really interested in becoming a father. Just working and becoming good at what I do. While I don't have to much time to learn at home now. I have been given that opportunity at work. Something that I'm very pleased and fortunate to be able to say.

Two years ago I was just learning to MEL script in Maya. I bought a DVD and decided that I could do it. Work noticed that I showed promise in this area and that I could rig. I was previously on a Environment team as a generalist, modeling game levels and lighting with our in house tools. I loved that side of my work. Before joining Eurocom I was a character animator at Digi-Guys in pinewood studios. So I've done a little of everything so far. The pull to scripting was a weird one for me. Other artist had done it. And I would often say in jest "by the time you've written that I could have done t already".

I didn't understand that writing code is an artistic process. That's a wider debate, but I do feel a lot of the same artistic decision's I would make before; I still make now when coding in python.

So I've been writing tools for Maya in MEL and python. Solving rigging issues for the rigging department and writing supporting tools for the art-pipelines. Four year ago I would have never thought that I could program in MEL. Let alone become a proper programmer with pythons object orientated design. I've learned PyQt and written large asset management UI's and become a Maya beta tester.

Hopefully this will be the 1st of many posts about 3d, life, art and python, I'm not counting my 1st post back in 2008.

1st Blog Post

It seems the cool and trendy thing to do these days. So I'll give it a go. I'll try to update with useful 3d stuff as often as possible and even publish a few scripts and tutorials.

Who am I you might ask...

I'm a 29 year old 3d artist that has 9 years industry experience. Over the years I've been an animator, environment artist, games artist and now a technical animator. Alot of my work is under NDA's but some of the older artwork can now be shown. I'll endeavor to dig the old stuff out and show it, also I'll do a few maya rigging tutorials and hopefully post some scripts if work will permit me to do so.

So watch this space...