In the Hypershade, you can right click on a material and get a selection of everything it's assigned to. This button grabs all materials on an object (but not face selection). You may want to check out Material Manager, super super handy script by Bartalon, it auto highlights materials in the list based on selection.
@Yadoob - This is very cool and will have tons of use for future workflows as deferred decals become more common place. I showed it around the office and others were excited about it! Waywo - We would gobble up a well constructed maya script that mimicked this! [Edited to be more constructive]
They use face weighted vertex normals. Ther's a thread floating around about custom vertex normals on the first or second page. Should have some useful scripts for you. edit: http://polycount.com/discussion/154664/a-short-explanation-about-custom-vertex-normals-tutorial/p1
Just wrote my very first MEL script, its super simple and I basically just stitched together a few commands but I would probably go insane unwrapping all this hair without it :D Also: Sneak peak of the redesign of Amelie, our main character :)
I havent tried it but if your isolate select is on a shortcut you could probably add this code in front of the isolate code. So your shortcut runs this then isolate. Though shelving it is easy as well. It continues to work until you close maya, then you will have to run the script again.
In this case, mirroring is just copying the half of the mesh that is uvmaped to the other side. Basically like applying a symmetry to the mesh. Plus, you always have to offset the uvs to the side on the mirrored parts or else you will have overlaped uvs and it will cause issues when baking. :) For reals. this script is…
@Larry I tried to search some scripts or plugins for cable but I didn't find. So I created about 10 different cable assets and did copy&paste. Of course it's not fit many times. In this case I used maya soft selection and tweaked very easily.
Wasn't happy with the texel resolution; seems the normalization script wasn't behaving very well, so I rescaled them manually and repacked the UVs. Painted some textures. Hand-painted textures are harder than I thought they'd be... XD Also rigged her up for animation.
I've never really liked Max's local extrude, works accurately for me about half the time. I would recommend Illusioncatalyt's extendsurface script, been using it for years in production and it's a good alternative to max's if doesn't give you the desired results.…
Hey guys, just thought I'd throw my portfolio up here and see if I can get some thoughts / suggestions / crits / whatever you got. And yes I know its a carbonmade portfolio but hey I'm too busy doing art to script a web page and I actually think its a good site:) www.robstephens.carbonmade.com