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Tech Artist - What are you working on: FOREVER Edition!

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  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    I started mucking around with the openLock system for 3d printing environments for miniatures and got hacked off looking for components so I knocked up a little asset browser that xrefs things into your scene from a dotnet list view.

    It's not a general asset browsing solution but it's pretty simple and has saved me a lot of fannying about - if anyone wants the code to use as a jumping off point they're welcome to it




  • Tekoppar
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    Tekoppar polycounter lvl 10
    Got the snap kinda working.


  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    That looks pretty good, will it do other types of rock or just this one style?
  • kritskiy
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    kritskiy polycounter lvl 10
    Working on a Photoshop extension that allows loading selections from layers, channels and ID maps:


  • d1ver
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    d1ver polycounter lvl 14
    @kritskiy - love the idea man. great job!
    @sltrOlsson - thank you for the breakdown. looks good

  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    You know what I really need in Photoshop, a way to take my selection from one layer and put it on a new layer and then delete my selection from the old layer. Basically extract the data on to a new layer. I use the j key to do this currently and it's annoying because the selection goes missing, also I tried ctrl + x for cut, but that also loses the selection and then you have to use some mumbo jump key combination to paste it onto the new layer and it never lines up in the right spot.
  • haiddasalami
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    haiddasalami polycounter lvl 13
    @Malcom Isnt that what Shift + Ctrl + J does? Supposed to create a new layer from selection using cut. It doesnt keep the selection though unless I read that wrong. 
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Oh my god you just changed my life! Thank you this is the best!
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Cool stuff, what's pymel I've seen the word around for a while but I'm not sure the definition. I'm still learning and just writing everything in mel so far, will start to integrate python as a get better.
  • Jukov.CG
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    Jukov.CG interpolator
    malcolm, thank you =)Pymel is very handy as you work not with strings like in mel but with objects. It gives many benefits. However, if you have to process large amount of data, then you’d better learn Maya Python API for fast working of a script. As to me it’s not so handy but fast.

  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    yeah pymel is a wrapper to maya.cmds that makes it less utterly fucking horrendous to write code for.  

    it is slower but if you're really bothered about speed you want to be poking openMaya instead cos the basic python stuff is still slow as shite.


  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Thanks, good to know. I'll be in mel I think for a couple years, still learning the basics and teaching myself as I go.
  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    playing with some wave noise on cylinders


  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    scripted plugin for a spiral cylinder.... heres one that is conformed to a spline,

    in a more basic form....
    uvs are as follows when both ends are capped


  • Jonathan_Persson
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    Jonathan_Persson polycounter lvl 6
    Made this quick one for Maya, it skips edges based on the selection  :)


  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Cool I created the same thing, have you figured out how to make it work with verts and faces. I could only get mine to work with edges.
  • Darkimage
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    Darkimage polycounter lvl 8
    I wrote a plugin for Substance Designer that let you import assets from Quixel Megascan using Quixel Bridge
    Link to the post for all the details of the plugin!

    The plugin in action:


    The plugin is completely open source and you can find the repository here
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Wow, that's neat. Definitely sell that.
  • Darkimage
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    Darkimage polycounter lvl 8
    malcolm said:
    Wow, that's neat. Definitely sell that.
    if you are referring to my plugin thank you, i appreciated you comment. The plugin is completely free and open source for everybody Megascan Link v0.1.1-beta
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    This morning I've been growing tree shaped SDFs in substance designer


  • onionhead_o
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    onionhead_o polycounter lvl 15
    Klunk, your stuff is always amazing. wish i was still using max.

    I recently made a tool for maya, that extracts Panels from selected faces. working on an update to do round corners(bevel) as well.

    link to script
     







    EDIT: included link to script
  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    thankyou :)

    a retriangulate "poly" for editable mesh will handle "internal" verts but not shared verts or self intersection.




  • dlz
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    dlz polycounter lvl 4
    I'm building a simple tool in python for maya to select edges two ways:
    - select edges included between a minimum and maximum angle
    - select hard edges in the mesh.
    I think it can be useful to combine these two functions in the same ui. I modify a bit the constraints that are present in maya to make it easy to use.

    i think it's a faster and easier way to select the edges you need than with the tools maya provide.

  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    nice, i've done something similar as a mod in max, one additional feature you can add is the option to replace/add/subtract from the current selection (also an invert the selection can be sometimes useful).


  • dlz
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    dlz polycounter lvl 4
    @klunk thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that
  • DEElekgolo
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    DEElekgolo interpolator
    Live texture animation/motion-graphic plugin for Adobe After Effects, accelerated using Vulkan!

  • nebukadnezar
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    nebukadnezar polycounter lvl 8
    Just found this thread. Very cool stuff you guys are doing!

    I Released Colormate a color management and palette importer addon for Blender, about 3 weeks ago.
    Features include:
    • Color palette importing ( .aco, .ase, .acb, .gpl, .kpl)
    • Realtime color harmony calculation
    • Color Ramp Node generation from a range of colors

  • mhdmhd
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    mhdmhd polycounter lvl 10
    https://youtu.be/I4shNs4srKw

    https://youtu.be/Y_bSzn3-h2k


    https://github.com/mhdmhd/MayaSceneConverter

    Maya Scene Converter is a python-based Qt tool for converting scenes from a render engine to another in Maya, it is not a perfect conversion and it depends on rules files and how good they are but gives you a great head start.

    Features

    • Creates rules to convert from a source render engine to a target render engine
    • Easy UI to create, save and load the rules
    • Supports all shading related nodes: Materials,Textures,Utilities and Lights
    • Converts all the scene or selected objects
    • Scans the scene for any node or only what belongs to the source engine
    • Some ready examples of rules files (not very precise but very functional)
    • Prints info about all conversions
    • Tested with Windows only but could work on other operating systems
    • Tested with Maya 2018+ but could work on previous versions
  • Darkimage
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    Darkimage polycounter lvl 8
    Hello guys,
    Since i made the Megascan Link Plugin for Substance Designer  i decided to the same for Substance Painter.
    With the Megascan Link for Substance Painter plugin you can import Megascan Assets directly into an opened project or create one if you export from Quixel Bridge a Megascan Asset with a 3D mesh. 
    The plugin is completely Free and OpenSource, you can Download it here and you can find the complete Documentation here.


  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Oh wow, very cool. Definitely start selling these.
  • dlz
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    dlz polycounter lvl 4
    finished a script for maya i was working on some time ago.
    I think it could be useful in hard-surface workflows as it makes easier to select edges by an angle or other characteristics and then apply a crease that can be selected and uncreased.
    here's a demo of the script:
    https://youtu.be/pONjlLcJVBU


  • AmplifyCreations
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    AmplifyCreations polycounter lvl 8
    Hey folks, any of you had luck with exporting consistent Vector Displacement Maps from Zbrush, Blender(or others) to Unity or Unreal? Zbrush seems really inconsistent, even with their test scene; Blender is a bit troublesome, can't seem to get it working right.

    Zbrush: Manual VDM Reference
    Blender - Cycles - Tangent Vector & Scalar Displacement Map Baking Tutorial

    We're exploring VDM's at Amplify with Amplify Shader Editor in Unity and, so far, it seems that Mudbox gives out the best results with the "Absolute Tangent" mode. You can really do some cool stuff with this when you couple it with Tessellation, even use it on skinned characters! Off course you can always do some pretty cool stuff with regular displacement, this is more of an alternative technique. 

    This is an exaggerated effect with an animated Tessellation amount, in a real world case you'd probably want to use a low poly base mesh closer to the mushroom in order to cut down on the Tessellation. The cool thing is that you pretty much get LOD control for free.



    Here's how to set it up with Mudbox for Unity using Amplify Shader Editor(or any other shader/editor capable of handling the process), it even works with overlapping objects such as the mushroom patch bellow. 





    For those who don't know what's the big deal, here's a simplified comparison.

  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    VDM is the shit in Mudbox, but I always found the limitation that to create the VDM you have to sculpt it out of a perfect tessellated quad to start makes the tool not really useful. If it was like a normal map or height map where you could bake an arbitrary mesh or collection of meshes onto a quad with different topology that would be very powerful.
  • AmplifyCreations
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    AmplifyCreations polycounter lvl 8
    malcolm said:
    VDM is the shit in Mudbox, but I always found the limitation that to create the VDM you have to sculpt it out of a perfect tessellated quad to start makes the tool not really useful. If it was like a normal map or height map where you could bake an arbitrary mesh or collection of meshes onto a quad with different topology that would be very powerful.
    Yeah it's pretty cool! 

    That's the downside, it needs your subdiv levels so it can compare the lowest with the highest when baking the VDM; it would be awesome if we could just project a bunch of stuff. However, you should be able to use other meshes, just as long as you have the base level in Mudbox as well.

    A cool trick is to create several VDM files and actually use them inside Mudbox to create more complex objects.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Very cool none the less, how did you go about modeling the mushroom, make it first and then flatten it to a plane, or the reverse?
  • AmplifyCreations
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    AmplifyCreations polycounter lvl 8
    Yeah, fun to play with. For this one we went from quad to mushroom, carefully pushing/pulling the geometry to the center so it would have a decent amount to work with; somewhat worked but in hindsight probably should have used a low poly mesh ;). For the next one for sure.

  • onionhead_o
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    onionhead_o polycounter lvl 15
    AmplifyCreations: cool shader! There is a workaround for the VDM creation . Create the object first however you want it is. Then wrap the plane around the object and project the details. You  can use shrinkwrap deformer in maya or conform to project. You can even use quad draw to make it conform manually.
  • suspectlogic
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    suspectlogic polycounter lvl 12
    I made a simple Maya script for a very particular situation tonight :P Something like this might be floating around somewhere but I wasn't able to find anything.

    The script reads the current scenes grid, and saves it to user prefs. It also let's you see the changes immediately in the viewport and grid options box. This gif shows an example where the grid originally reads size = 24, spacing = 24 & divisions = 2. After the script is run, the options box updates to the scenes units which are size = 500, spacing = 500 & divisions = 2.



    <div>import&nbsp;maya.cmds&nbsp;as&nbsp;cmds</div><br><div>S&nbsp;=&nbsp;cmds.grid(&nbsp;q&nbsp;=&nbsp;True,&nbsp;s&nbsp;=&nbsp;True)</div><div>SP&nbsp;=&nbsp;cmds.grid(&nbsp;q&nbsp;=&nbsp;True,&nbsp;sp&nbsp;=&nbsp;True)</div><div>D&nbsp;=&nbsp;cmds.grid(q&nbsp;=&nbsp;True,&nbsp;d&nbsp;=&nbsp;True)</div><br><div>#converting&nbsp;grid&nbsp;values&nbsp;to&nbsp;a&nbsp;string&nbsp;for&nbsp;UI.</div><div>currGrid&nbsp;=&nbsp;('Size&nbsp;=&nbsp;'&nbsp;+&nbsp;str(S)&nbsp;+&nbsp;'\nSpacing&nbsp;=&nbsp;'&nbsp;+&nbsp;str(SP)&nbsp;+&nbsp;'\nDivisions&nbsp;=&nbsp;'&nbsp;+&nbsp;str(D))</div><br><div>#&nbsp;create&nbsp;dialog&nbsp;window</div><div>updateGrid&nbsp;=&nbsp;cmds.confirmDialog(</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;title='Save&nbsp;Grid&nbsp;Settings',</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;message=&nbsp;'Scene&nbsp;Grid&nbsp;Settings:'&nbsp;+&nbsp;'\n'&nbsp;+&nbsp;currGrid&nbsp;+&nbsp;'\n'&nbsp;+&nbsp;'\nPress&nbsp;OK&nbsp;to&nbsp;save&nbsp;these&nbsp;settings&nbsp;to&nbsp;User&nbsp;Preferences\n&nbsp;',</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;button=['OK',&nbsp;'Cancel'],</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;defaultButton='OK',</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cancelButton='Cancel')</div><br><div>#&nbsp;Store&nbsp;scene&nbsp;settings&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;user&nbsp;prefs&nbsp;file.</div><div>if&nbsp;updateGrid&nbsp;==&nbsp;'OK':</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cmds.optionVar(fv=('gridSpacing',&nbsp;S))</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cmds.optionVar(fv=('gridDivisions',&nbsp;D))</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cmds.optionVar(fv=('gridSize',&nbsp;S))</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cmds.savePrefs(g&nbsp;=&nbsp;True)&nbsp;#&nbsp;Without&nbsp;this&nbsp;maya&nbsp;won't&nbsp;save&nbsp;above&nbsp;changes&nbsp;until&nbsp;restart.</div><br><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;print&nbsp;'\nSaved!!!'</div><div>else:</div><div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;print&nbsp;'\nOperation&nbsp;Aborted'</div>

  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    scratched an itch that been bugging me since about 2003 :D a Simple Line Shape.... it has length & number of segments and linear or smooth options and you can set the axis the knots are distributed along and the pivot position (either end or center). Sometime the built in "complex" editable line is overkill and is tricky to generate some stiuff and the rollout can be slow and clunky.


    it was relatively quick and painless to implement.


  • pi3c3
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    pi3c3 polycounter lvl 11
    Klunk said:
    scratched an itch that been bugging me since about 2003 :D a Simple Line Shape.... it has length & number of segments and linear or smooth options and you can set the axis the knots are distributed along and the pivot position (either end or center). Sometime the built in "complex" editable line is overkill and is tricky to generate some stiuff and the rollout can be slow and clunky.


    it was relatively quick and painless to implement.


    So obvious :D
  • Klunk
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    Klunk sublime tool
    yay! my 50th max modifier :) (christ I need to get out more!)


    CapSpline  that works a bit better than the built in max one (edit mesh mod applied to the A on the left, mine of the right).  Obviously showing the worst case for the built in max functionality :D
  • pi3c3
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    pi3c3 polycounter lvl 11
    Klunk said:
    yay! my 50th max modifier :) (christ I need to get out more!)


    CapSpline  that works a bit better than the built in max one (edit mesh mod applied to the A on the left, mine of the right).  Obviously showing the worst case for the built in max functionality :D
    Congrats! :)

    There are so many things in max that is not working appropriately, and most of them not even complicated to fix. I'll never understand why aren't they fix them. Like this one. :)

    But anyway. It's so much better to look at the good one... :D
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    Klunk said:
    yay! my 50th max modifier :) (christ I need to get out more!)


    CapSpline  that works a bit better than the built in max one (edit mesh mod applied to the A on the left, mine of the right).  Obviously showing the worst case for the built in max functionality :D
    I want this more than I wanted toilet paper in March  
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