How to create cartoon character illustration in Maya

How to create cartoon character illustration in Maya!

http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/how-create-cartoon-character-illustration-maya-11135337

Embracing and running with Maya 2016 Sculpting - Timelapse from Ryan Wood - Buh bye sculpting progs, Maya's come'n 4 ya

Head Hacking with Andrew Silke - Maya: Cartoon Head Topology - Overview (Long Version)

Anzovin, doing amazing things on a daily basis. ART Preview: Muscle Systems and Pose-Space Deformation

Buy their tools please, do not steal.



http://www.anzovin.com/products/

Toggle Smooth mesh of all obejects in your scene Mel Script for Maya

You can paste this right into the command window of a shelf button:

select -cl;

SelectAll;

string $sel[] =`ls -sl`;

for ($thisObj in $sel){

int $displaylevel[] = `displaySmoothness -query -polygonObject $thisObj`;

if ($displaylevel[0] == 1)

{

//Go to 3

displaySmoothness -polygonObject 3;

}

if ($displaylevel[0] == 3)

{

//Go to 1

displaySmoothness -polygonObject 1;

}

    }

Lbrush Lipservice, bought and paid for, a beauty of a plugin. Streamline the animation process with this powerhouse of a plugin.

I purchased the Lbrush Lipservice plugin sometime last year and realized that it's an amazingly full and powerful animation setup toolset for maya. IT IS A BEAST@!

Sculpt with the ability to increase subdivision levels with the pupose of scultping blendshapes and blendshape correction ulitlizing builtin pose deformers. You dont have to load any seperate plugins or scripts.

Using this plugin, you don't have to create seperate blendshapes, just load into a new button everytime you sculpt a phoneme or beef up a muscle with a joint! And they are resculptable, meaning you can change them.

You can load existing blendshapes into the built in phoneme & blink buttons.

There are spiffy thumbnail previews for each button that it takes on auto and reload them on the fly.

Facial Animation with Lbrush Lipserve, tutorial, Click here

The feature is called Blendshapes+ , like me, it's an amazing tool! heh
The sculpting is so powerful, it comes with many brush patterns and you can easily make and load your own. 

It has built in stencils akin to Mudbox & zbrush. And the second amazing feature is 3D TEXTURE PAINTING, easily project full faces and blend them onto models. It adds a whole new creative toolset.

Texture painting with beautiful results!

Posespace deformation is another feature, if you are not familiar with this concept, you can add flexing shape to muscles via sculpting with the plugin's tools. Give that muscle flexing appearance and have it move with the joints.

Pose Space Deformer Tutorial with LBRUSH

It just has so many features it's tough to get granular and detail each one, but it's so easy to work with and create a whole new streamlined workflow.

Please visit the site and check it out. Try to buy. The demo vids had me at hello.

LBRUSH LIPSERVICE Website

Fabric Engine, Fabric Splice - Installing for Maya on OSX, how to set up

"Fabric Engine is a development framework that reduces the cost and risk of building high-performance custom tools."

Fabric Engine Trailer, Click here

You can just freeflow around in a fully rendered viewport scene. The FPS shouldn't nose dive as it would normally.  It sounds like a slice of the good stuff on a platter. Wow indeed.
Also they are constantly adding features and going way beyond their depth and making it their depth, so impressive, rendering, rigging, mocap, crowd building, just inasnity, I can't justify it into words:

Fabric Engine's, Vimeo Channel

That being said, it's a bit of a beast to set up, well, it's a lot of a beast if you don't know how to do it. There are no good instructions out there for installation, here is how I eventually did it after finding tidbits of info and piecing together:

1. Do not use their installer (Just skip step 1, it's here because it used to be a part of the install)

It is old and not up to date.

Do not add environment variable in lanchd.conf

This was discontinued.

Skip to step 2.

2. Download the latest Engine:

http://dist.fabric-engine.com/FabricEngine/

Extract it, don't change the huge folder name.

I put it here, this is where the old installer used to put it: /Library/FabricEngine/

Don't rename their folder, it has a long crazy name.

3. Edit the FabricSpliceMaya.mod file,  in fabric engines module directory located here (Do not relocate): 

/Library/FabricEngine/1.15.0/SpliceIntegrations/FabricSpliceMaya2014SP3 

It should look like this after you edit it:

+ FabricSpliceMaya 1.0 .

FABRIC_EXTS_PATH +:= /Library/FabricEngine/1.15.0/Exts

PYTHONPATH +:= /Library/FabricEngine/1.15.0/python/2.7

PATH +:= /Library/FabricEngine/1.15.0/SpliceIntegrations/FabricSpliceMaya2014SP3/plug-ins

After editing it, close it and double check it that it editited.

5. I also had to add to the maya.env file (wouldn't work without this), located in this path:

/Users/yourusername/Library/preferences/autodesk/maya/2014-x64/modules/maya.env

FABRIC_DIR=/Library/FabricEngine/FabricEngine-1.15.1-Darwin-x86_64
FABRIC_EXTS_PATH=/Library/FabricEngine/FabricEngine-1.15.1-Darwin-x86_64/Exts

MAYA_MODULE_PATH=/Library/FabricEngine/FabricEngine-1.15.1-Darwin-x86_64/SpliceIntegrations/FabricSpliceMaya2014SP3

6. Put these lines in usersetup.mel to make the fabricSplice plugin autorun auto run:

//Auto loads FabricSplice plugin so you don't have to

if(!`pluginInfo -query -l -n FabricSpliceMaya`) loadPlugin "FabricSpliceMaya"; 

7. then you must open maya terminal (not regular terminal) and Source environment.sh  

(Do not edit this file since it pulls it's info from maya.env and the FabricSpliceMaya.mod)

open terminal, in shell, new window, maya...

type source 

and just drag in environment.sh from where it is sitting in /library/fabricengine/1.15.0 into the terminal after source. then hit enter, errors mean it's messed up.

8. Reboot. 

9. open maya terminal

source environment.sh

and to open maya, you just type maya

It will show up in the toolbar menu as "fabricsplice: something"

If it is not running then go into your plugins manager and see if it is checked.

10. (Optional) Made a duplicate user startup script called userSetupFabric.mel, in maya’s script folder in the regular user directory. then made an applescript that runs this start up script instead to make a separate alias to run fabric and have a non fabric alias , so i have two on the doc and named them accordingly.

--open terminal

tell application "Terminal"

activate

delay 0.8

--run maya env variables

do script ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh"

--keystroke ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh"

tell application "System Events"

keystroke return

delay 1

keystroke "source /Library/FabricEngine/FabricEngine-1.15.1-Darwin-x86_64/SpliceIntegrations/FabricSpliceMaya2014SP3/environment.sh"

keystroke return

delay 1

--start maya

keystroke "maya -script userSetupFabric.mel"

keystroke return

--don't kill terminal, just leave it open while you use maya, killing terminal here with kill maya

--tell application "System Events"

--kill terminal

--keystroke "killall Terminal"

end tell

end tell

Don’t Kill the terminal or it will kill maya abruptly, instead leave the terminal running.

Notes:

Do not move their plug in (FabricSpliceMaya.bundle), environment.sh points to the plugin in their directory. I did trying to force it to work and this caused errors.

Fabric may not play nicely with some other plugins and python. I notice they improve it a little with each iteration.

Bonus Step 10.

If you don't want fabric to be permanent, you can make an alias that boots maya with a a different user pref file and starts the plugin, so that you can start a version of maya without fabric started.

If there is interest in this let me know.

The Maya Selection Editor, brought it back cuz I like it.

This is the original selection editor, just regurgitating, I am clearly not the author:


Put this in your userSetup.mel
//Selection Editor
source AddSelectionEditorToEditMenu.mel;


The Mel script is here, put in your scripts folder:
http://www.uberware.net/mel/#selectionEditorWin

Then upon a fresh maya startup it should be located here:

Also you can make a shelf button, just pop this into the command:
selectionEditorWin;

Fstretch 2 for Maya, now free... very cool

Well yea, look at that, it's free! Not sure which I would recomend yet, I have played with Fstretch & Stretchmesh by kickstand only once each so far.

Download:
http://www.cgaddict.com/download.html

Demo:

Basic Tutorial by it's author:

The author would like you to donate to some charities, very nice.

Free Renderman for Maya... OMG

http://renderman.pixar.com/view/non-commercial-renderman

Renderman from pixar is out and it's free, it's non-comercial, but yea it's free. Check it out!@

Here is a test render on a character of mine, only turned "Shading Rate" up to 100. Haven't messed with other settings:

Maya 2016, My Maya Sculpting ToolBar & Mudbox & ZB & Modo & Librush/Lipserve & Waxlab rant & ADHD, try to stay with me

While maya 2016 will have vast improvements on sculpting (it's been too long), it will on a low level mimic mudbox, I think... I believe..
My opinion is (worth a penny, maybe not) that Mudbox is the friendliest sculpting prog around. You can dive into it and almost figure it out completely with out too much fuss, almost.
I tried ZB, i am not smart enough to use its interface... or from whatever planet it's accepted as the norm on... oh maybe mine, I must suck. lol. I zremeshed a model in it, after importing and then exported it. it's pretty darn good at that. not sure I would be able to do it again, I would need to sleep in a vat of caffeine for stimulation.

It's been my long belief that Mudbox should be rolled into Maya and be a module similar to what Modo does... Modo.. ahem very nice prog, been tooling with that one it seems to just have everything built in. So, hard to break the feelings of loyalty, ugh. But, the trick is if you are transitioning from Maya; to set navigation and cameras to sim Maya, turn camera roll off or better yet, turn trackball nav off... I was like what s this, marbal madness? I did the first option and was still dumbfounded, then did the second and was like wow, this is sweet.
Modo is up and coming, hell of a lot cheaper and AD needs to watch out for this beast.

Anyway, here is a look at my sculpting toolbar it's kinda cool:

I set up aritsan as buttons along with it's brushes, made a soft mod button, soft mod resize button, soft select toggle button, select paint button and put My sculpting plugins in there too which are paid for. Although lbrush is excellent at basic sculpting thats not what it's meant for. Waxlab is pretty cool, has brushes and stencils, the owner says they are working on texture painting. 

Lbrush\lipserve is kinda AMAZING for post deformer sculpting with blendshapes and joint stuff and it has blendshapes built in a cool way that you don't have to duplicate meshes and is a very competent  texture painter. Thats just the surface of that plugin. Honestly Joe Alter could just build his own prog and use this plugin as the starter.

Alas as far as sculpting is concerned - to me, nothing replaces mudbox.. layers, details, really nice sculpting, texture painting, stencils and layers, did I say layers? It's just so easy to use.

Maya can have a slow viewport FPS on some MACs, combat the slow fps

I have an ok macbookpro, I guess my gpu is sucky for maya usage, anyway I managed to squeeze a few more FPS out of my GPU, i witnessed the bump up, but not guaranteed that this will do anything for you. maybe my machine will start bleeding and have a heart attack, or maya will crash... crashing? maya? unusual captain.

Edit maya enviroment variables maya.env, pop this line in:
MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT=6000 in ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2014-x64/Maya.env

Then run from the terminal, like in my previous post you can make an applescript and an alias, make it into a good look'n icon or from the maya terminal run:

open /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app

Stretchmesh Re-compiled for Maya 2014 & 2015 for OSX

I & my friend put it on their google code site, but it's in a weird spot since I couldn't edit their version page. Without further ado, stretchmesh recompiled, booyah.

Download:
https://code.google.com/p/stretchmesh/issues/detail?id=14



Demo/Tutorial:

For stretchiness and collisions into the stretchiness. Easy to use!

Happy stretching.

Reloading plugins for stubborn Maya plugins that wont startup

I guess I could have put them in the startup maya file on osx, but then my menu is so over friggen crowded. I toyed with making just a plugin menu but, it seems breaky, like it won't stick. Hard maya users know what i mean - well on osx.

Just plug this into a new shelf button's command window.

file -new -force -prompt 0;

unloadPlugin "stretchMesh2014.bundle";

loadPlugin "/Users/Shared/Autodesk/maya/2014/plug-ins/stretchMesh2014.bundle";

SetupMyPlugin();

WARNING: It may close your scene and reload maya all together, doesn't break anything... otherwise.

Open Maya from terminal to run Environment Variables

Basically, if you edit your environment variables on OSX, maya won't necessarily run them on auto when you start it if you have special entries in there. I have a few relating to Fabric Engine and starting up.

This script runs terminal, opens your environment variables and runs maya with those specific variables, then it kills terminal.

After editing your maya env variables fiel, you would use this in apple script. I went as far as making a shortcut/alias to it and placing it in my doc to replace the regular maya alias in my doc. I edited the env file with sudo nano to make sure the changes stuck.

--try

--open terminal

tell application "Terminal"

activate

delay 0.8

--run maya env variables

do script ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh"

--keystroke ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh"

tell application "System Events"

keystroke return

delay 1

--start maya

keystroke "open /Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app"

keystroke return

delay 8

--kill terminal

set BunchaAppsProcesses to {"Terminal", ""}

tell application "System Events"

repeat with BunchaAppsProcesses in BunchaAppsProcesses

set BunchaAppsProcessUnixID to (unix id of processes whose name is BunchaAppsProcesses)

try

do shell script "kill -9 " & BunchaAppsProcessUnixID

end try

end repeat

end tell

end tell

end tell

--end tell

--end tell

--end try