Maya wiki news, updates

And we're back!

Finished my time at Dr.D and houdini, back at Animal Logic now, which means back in maya. Expect a few minor updates as I try and get reaquanted with my old nemesis...

Minor changes

I'm trying to update the rigging section a bit, remove some old links (and the plugin section which was all dead). I still think tokeru is a very good ressource and I wish it stays up to date and useful. -- MattBernadat - 30 Sep 2011

Maya for houdini folk

I'm currently working at Dr.D studios using houdini. Thought I'd setup a section here for maya users looking to get into houdini. If it sprawls out too large I might split it into a separate wiki, or maybe ask the nice folk at odforce if I can copy files over there. We'll see. Enyhoo, have a read of MayaToHoudini .

Maya Mailing list

After the highend3d mailing list died, I setup a new one. Very quiet list, good signal to noise ratio, if you've stumbled across this site, you should probably join. http://groups.google.com/group/maya_he3d/

New front page layout

Blogs are the new black it seems. I don't have the energy to run 2 sites, but I've decided to make this front page a collection of latest quick tips, with links to the other sections as appropriate. If you're new here, browse the categories over on the left for various maya tidbits. Read about the background here, or signup for an account to add/fix things yourself.

Proxies

Mentalray proxies combined with the rasterizer work, but was a bit of a slog to get them working properly. Read through the MayaMentalRay section for some tricks.

Maya and python

Still haven't made the leap yet (largely due to laziness and mel being 'good enough' for my poor coding efforts), but when I do eventually take the plunge, it'll be because of these two sites. First is the blog of Ryan Trowbridge, a TD at Naughty Dog. He's posted some great info to help translate the slightly scary C++ API notes into pythonspeak. The other is the pymel project by Luma Pictures and several others. The intro documentation makes it all seem laughably easy, almost makes me ashamed for not having tried it by now. Well worth a look. Oh, don't forget to sign up for the python-inside-maya mailing list, great info there too.

Disabled new registrations

Open registrations on this site used to seem like a good thing... getting a lot of spambot registrations, so I've disabled new users for now. If you really need to add or improve something, email me.

Rendering Wiki

Haggi Krey is maintaining a wiki that covers rendering engines, techniques and theory. Tries to stay as objective as possible in comparing systems, pros and cons etc, very useful. http://www.wiki.render3d.de/

Framebuffers

Maya 2009 finally has proper framebuffer support, woo! Until we get our hands on it in october, here's how to achieve it with maya 2008. Needs custom shaders, a bit fiddly, but definitely useable in production. Find out more here, here and here and thank Aaron Grove for doing all the research and testing for us.

Two great maya sites

http://www.tgjay.com and http://www.djx.com.au/blog/ , go visit!

Poly loop and ring select shortcuts in maya 2008

Select an edge, press left or right arrow to select the edgeloop, or up/down to select the edgering. Press again and it'll select the next/previous ring/edge.

A proper mel wiki

Take a look at Eric Pavey MEL Wiki. Fantastic tips and howtos, covers some of the ground from the missing bryan ewert site. You can save the (single!) webpage to your computer for offline reference (make sure you are using FF/Opera/Chrome)

Change of address

The wiki is at a new address, I've tried to setup an auto-redirect, but if that fails please update your bookmarks to the following:

http://www.tokeru.com/t