If these maya tools existed would you pay for them?
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A friend of mine is thinking about releasing some world building/environment art tools for maya and charging a license fee per work station. He's wondering if anyone would pay for the bundle and how much would they be willing to pay. For me personally without these tools set dressing large environments in maya isn't any option so I'd pay 50 bucks just to make my life easier. Would be a lot cheaper than having your in house tech artist write them all or if you don't have a tech artist. Also all tools are written in the API so they are lightning fast no long wait times to use a tool when working with high poly scenes.
1. Texel density tool, scales your uv shells to a user specifed scale.
2. Object placement tool, select objects you want to place, select any geo you want to place them on and click the mouse or click the mouse and drag, to drag the model along the surface normal, supports random rotation scale and offset, all randomization can be turned off and min/max values supported.
3. Vertex and object stamper, select any number of models and then select other models, stamp the vertices down with a user defined offset, good for placing floating decals. Also works with object transforms so you can stamp down a bunce of floating models, place them in the top view and then stamp them down to whatever geo you select, supports aligning to the surface normal or not.
4. Regenerate rotation/scale pivot, after you have rotated a model and then frozen the transform sometimes you want to scale along an edge axis or rotate along an edge axis, select the edge and use it's normal to regenerate the rotate/scale pivot. Also supports regeneration correct transform from 0,0,0 after moving pivot.
Those are the main ones I think, there was some other shit but I can't remember right now he can pretty much write whatever so I'm sure he would take requests and build out a bunch of other commonly wanted environment art tools if there is interest in this package.
1. Texel density tool, scales your uv shells to a user specifed scale.
2. Object placement tool, select objects you want to place, select any geo you want to place them on and click the mouse or click the mouse and drag, to drag the model along the surface normal, supports random rotation scale and offset, all randomization can be turned off and min/max values supported.
3. Vertex and object stamper, select any number of models and then select other models, stamp the vertices down with a user defined offset, good for placing floating decals. Also works with object transforms so you can stamp down a bunce of floating models, place them in the top view and then stamp them down to whatever geo you select, supports aligning to the surface normal or not.
4. Regenerate rotation/scale pivot, after you have rotated a model and then frozen the transform sometimes you want to scale along an edge axis or rotate along an edge axis, select the edge and use it's normal to regenerate the rotate/scale pivot. Also supports regeneration correct transform from 0,0,0 after moving pivot.
Those are the main ones I think, there was some other shit but I can't remember right now he can pretty much write whatever so I'm sure he would take requests and build out a bunch of other commonly wanted environment art tools if there is interest in this package.
Replies
would not pay for this one, already exists in maya.
pretty sure this one already exists in leveltools. your idea sounds like it has a few more options but there is a tool in leveltools where you can select thousands of objects then snap them all to a ground. it works by pivot point but if you use a script to drop the pivot point to the bottom of the objects bounding box, then execute this leveltools script it's very powerful enough already.
- if there is no free option available (money, option to edit/extend/improve code yourself)
- I really need the tools on a regular basis
- it were cheaper than 50,- (20/30 is okay, anything below that though more welcome)
- if its really something impressive or quality stuff (where you see the xtra effort) that is not available for free and really is worth the money
- if it comes with proper support
50 bucks is a lot for just a 4 small scripts (or more). I would usually expect for such a price a real application at least.
The bitter truth is that there are already many free scripts available that do similar things - its just a way of figuring out yourself where and how to get them and use them in your environment.
my home is not maya but just to prove whats already available for free:
1.) http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/poly_tools/worldSpaceUVLine-4508.html
2 + 3.) http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=64101
4.) http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/curve_tools/Local-Tools-3717.html
It's not much more than 200-300 lines of code, and probably could even be optimised more - also I'm pretty sure there are other scripts out there already which do similar things (and I know there's already one which you have to pay for, which frankly I would never do).
Number 2/3, didn't someone just post a free script for doing this sort of thing the other day?
Number 4 sounds like a pretty easy thing to script, so I probably wouldn't pay for that either.
Basically it sounds like personally I wouldn't pay for any of that, since I could either write it myself or get an existing script and maybe modify it. However for people who don't know how to script and want a "quick fix" of simple, pre-packaged tools, there might be a market if they weren't very expensive. I don't know though.
Most of that stuff already exists or would be easy enough to script.
Here's a very basic texel-density script I've written that someone might want to improve upon. Next step for me is to add a query for the existing texture size, but I suck at scripting so it's progressing very slowly
Edit: apparently I can't use the code-tag without getting an error when posting
global proc applyScale() {
string $sel[] = `ls -flatten -sl`;
float $txDensity = `floatField -q -v Density`;
float $textureSize = `floatField -q -v Resolution`;
float $scalar = $txDensity / $textureSize;
for ($i=0; $i < size($sel); $i++)
{
unfold -i 0 -ss 0.001 -gb 0 -gmb 1 -pub 0 -ps 0 -oa 0 -us on -s $scalar $sel[$i];
};
}
global proc setTexelDensity() {
string $windowTxDensity = `window
-title "Set Texel Density"
-iconName "setTxDens"
-w 420
-h 55
setTxDens `;
rowLayout
-numberOfColumns 5
-cw5 100 60 140 60 50
-cl5 "right" "left" "right" "left" "left";
text
-label "Texel Density";
floatField
-minValue 0
-precision 1
-step 1
Density;
text
-label "Texture Resolution";
floatField
-minValue 0
-precision 1
-step 1
Resolution;
button
-label "Apply"
-c "applyScale";
setParent ..;
showWindow $windowTxDensity;
}
Hi Toast, where is number 2 in maya already existing? I've also tried the level tools many times there's nothing in there that stamps objects correctly or verts correctly. Level tools was always the biggest joke for me, even their extract spline from edge script had huge performance issues I think we just downloaded one from highend3d or something.
Perna, these tools are all focused on production set dressing, so you would buy them if you are doing your level design or set dressing in maya rather than a level editor.
renderhjs, haven't looked at that paint geo script looks like it was posted recently. Too bad he didn't post that 6 months ago when we were writing ours. That local tools script looks great I'll check it out on monday at work. I frequent highend3d for scripts but I find the categories are pretty lame, basically if you're not going through each category by hand you'll never find the useful scripts. One time I knew the exact name of the script and couldn't find it using their search.
Mop I still haven't seen a good texel density tool I want it to work on selected shells and scale based on the selections pivot point. We downloaded the demo of that guy's pay script but it worked on individual shells so it wouldn't work across large terrain, and since we're still in maya 2008 no snap to uv feature to snap the shells back together. Also I did not like the interface too confusing to figure out how to tile it.
just to make sure we're on the same page here. what do you mean by stamp?
and example for what I'm talking about is say i have a scene where i have about 200 fence posts that were just modeled. they are floating above the ground and you want to "snap" them down to a hilly ground.
Well in Maya I just select the fence posts and first use the basePivot script.
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/misc/2679.html
Then I just select the ground and with levelTools I snap them all to the ground.
let me know if your idea is different to this i got a feeling were talking about slightly different things.
You can snap to UV:s in 2008. It's the same as snap to point (v) works like any other snap except for some reason you can't use the MMB. If you're looking for the Retain component spacing option it's in tool settings for the move tool when you have the UV-editor active.