Weight Hammer Brush

This tool is awesome, and I forgot to put it on my blog a couple years ago when I made it.
Add it to a shelf button, and use it after you've painted weights to average out the problem areas.
It works like a vertex selection brush, but runs the weight hammer command on the selected verts.

from pymel.core import *
hammerCtx = artSelectCtx(ads=0, asc='weightHammerVerts')
setToolTo(hammerCtx)

Rendering Joints with Viewport 2.0

This is something I haven't found a lot of support for online, so I figured I do a quick demo.
(Sorry for the fast / poor quality images)

1. Make sure you’re using Viewport 2.0

2. Turn on Anti-aliasing

3. Open the Hardware Render Buffer

4. Open the Attributes Panel

5. Make sure Joints are turned on

6. Set your frame range and make sure you have an alpha source 
(I usually use Hardware Alpha)

7. Render out your sequence!

I hope this helped, and good luck!

Hair Plane Tools!

This is a simple toolset I made for modelers who needed a quicker way to get planar hair created.

Check out the video and be sure to email me, or post comments with any questions about it!

Maya playblasts on windows!

Maya 64bit Windows appears to be the only version without quicktime support, which to me means crappy codecs, and/or huge filesizes (and more than likely both)

To combat this, I made a little script to compress your playblasts with x264.

You're going to need to save the x264.exe to your C:/ root directory.
Download x264 here!

Then just run this script:

 # Runs the PB Script and saves the file  
 from pymel.core import *  
 from pymel.util.path import path  
 import os  
 import subprocess  
 filename = path(str(fileDialog2(ff='*.mp4')[0]))  
 nicename = filename.strip('.mp4')  
 try:  
      blast = playblast(fmt='avi', v=0, os=1, wh=[1080,720], p=100, filename=nicename, fo=1)  
 except:  
      print 'Playblast interrupted; continuing compression'  
 finally:  
      os.system('C:\\x264.exe -o {nn}.mp4 {nn}.avi'.format(nn=nicename))  
      os.remove('{nn}.avi'.format(nn=nicename))  
      player = subprocess.Popen(filename, shell=1)  

You can edit the playblast line to suit your needs, also. (resolution, etc)
Try everything out and let me know how it goes!

Adding lights into the DX11 Shaders for Maya

I made a shader that added support for 5 lights instead of the default 3.
It took me about 5 minutes just poking around the default UberShader to figure out how to do it.

Feel free to download the shader I made, this one has support for 5 lights and I'll probably make another shader with support for more lights in the future.


Download MayaUberShader5Lights.fx

Enjoy!

Character GUI in PySide

This is a project I'm working on for a short film at Stripped Thread Studios.
This isn't even it's final form.

Demo Reel 2012