Back on Track

I got everything back to work again this afternoon and I think I got all the right versions as well. I was lucky I had most of my installs on my other drive, which really just means I didn't lose anything except for my windows OS. Afterwards I drank a couple cups of very strong coffee to celebrate and quickly painted an albedo in Mari to justify my effort. Below is a quick render of that with a soft roughness. All this data was saved on Dropbox, so I pretty much had an infinite copy of it.

Then, during the rest of the day I've been trying to get a Mari 2.6v5 license to try out the Material Manager on my home computer. I haven't been able to get a reply from The Foundry's support team yet and maybe they won't agree to it, but I hope they will. I've been working with that system at my job and it's great at distributing the workload and creating a nice overview of your project. In theory it should work quite well when you create a system that is clean. In practice you will need a GTX760 equivalent or better as it's sharing a lot of layers. Though regardless of system performance, Jens Kafitz did an absolutely amazing job.

Then I went on to write some scripts, to increase the speed of my workflow. I've always had a little interest in writing code. These are very simple, but exponentially increase my speed of working. I'm thinking about writing a windowed version but am a little afraid of QT.

So I don't have to go inside each mesh to change the smoothing method and iteration.

import maya.cmds as cmds
mySel = cmds.ls(dag=1, ap=1, sl=1, type='mesh')
for each in mySel:

     cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiSubdivType',1)
     #Sets subdivision method to catclark.
     cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiSubdivIterations',1)
     #Sets subdivision iteration to any number.
     cmds.setAttr (each+'.aiOpaque',0)
     #Sets shape to transparant in combination with opacity or transmission in shader.
     cmds.setAttr(each+'.aiSssSetname','SSS_Share', type="string")
     #Enables Sss sharing between two intersecting shapes.

The Maya dropdowns are way too small when I'm iterating a lot between textures.

import maya.cmds as cmds
     cmds.arnoldFlushCache( all=True )
     #Flushes all caches (Texture, SSS, BG, Hair, Quad)

And, since I built this lightrig and hate clicking the right mouse button.

import maya.cmds as cmds

mySel = cmds.ls(sl=True)

myLayer = cmds.ls(type = 'renderLayer')

for layer in myLayer:

     if layer == 'defaultRenderLayer':

          continue

     cmds.editRenderLayerMembers( layer , mySel )

     #Adds all selected shapes to all currently present render layers.

I gotta thank Wijnand Koreman for helping me out on the last one. Couldn't get the for loop to work. I felt pretty dumb when he showed me, since I found the solution a couple hours earlier but didn't implement it correctly. In total, that was still a busy day. Glad I got a couple things done this weekend.

Thanks for reading!

Pim

Windows 10 Anniversary Corruption

So yesterday I was (finally) confronted with the Windows 10 Anniversary update and figured I didn't have much of a choice so gave the installation a whirl. It rounded up nicely and I went to sleep. Then, when I came home from work my machine didn't boot. Ran as far as the BIOS, but I wasn't able to enter it and it sure as sh*t didn't boot all the way through. This almost makes me a yearly victim of Microsoft updates.

So now, after a couple hours of troubleshooting I think I can come to the conclusion that my windows OS has somehow corrupted during the Anniversary installation. Yesterday night it was fine and now it doesn't do anything. At first I was afraid my SSD was dead; then my suspicions lead me to believe it may be my SATA hub or mobo were dead, but that wasn't the case fortunately!

I have a windows 7 install as a backup to check for these sorts of things, so when I tried installing it on a HDD, everything went fine and I was able to conclude that the problem was with the SSD. So I tested that, with a SATA docking station I had lying around. Turns out the SSD is fine too and even the windows install looked fine... apart from the fact that it doesn't boot... which defeats the purpose of having a fine looking windows install.

To fix the whole thing I figured I'd just delete everything on the drive and start from scratch seeing as it's an SSD. Hopefully it was just a corruption and not a drive wide failure. We'll see. Safe to say I won't be working on my project tonight.

edit: Succes! I got Windows 10 working again so I should be set somewhere tomorrow. Right now I'm working on getting everything installed and tomorrow I'll make it workable again.

Lightrig v1.0, Mari 3v0 and Substance Designer

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog and not because of lack of attention to my hobbies. I've been quite busy at work and personal life took over for the past 8 months. Time flies when you're having fun or something like that. It's worth noting that, since my last blogpost, I've had a small 'revelation'; purchased Mari 3 and subscribed to a couple of personal learning editions of various types of software. I hate the limitations, but whatcha gonna do.

To start things off I built a little light rig using HDR images from HDRlabs. They've got a very nice library with images pretty much in the same value range. There were some inconsistencies between the ones I took, so I comped them in Fusion to get similar value ranges. I also resized the bigger ones down to 2k images because I don't think I'll need any bigger, Below are a couple of renders. I tried going for a wide variety of lighting conditions and reflective detail. Satisfied with the current results but I'm calling this v1.0.

I've also taken a violin from Turbosquid here to start texturing and get my game on at home, since personal studying has been on a low burner lately. The violin itself was exported directly from Zbrush so it's hardly clean but has an 'acceptable' topology. The UVs were okay, but since I will be the guy who's texturing it, I figured it'd be good practice to just do the UVs from scratch. Took me little over an hour but I think I can work with the results. I'm planning to do much of the detailing in Maya instead of Mari so I can shave off some texturing work. Below is the violin and rig behaving as intended. I could show you the UVs, but nothing is quite so boring as looking at UVs.

Then, a little over a week ago I jumped on the Substance bandwagon and created an account at Allegorithmic to try out their software. I haven't bought their software yet, but it's so much fun I'm definitely considering it. Maybe during the next Steam sale... I've done the absolute first tutorial on their youtube page. Afterwards I went a little deeper and came accross a guy called CynicatPro who had a 4-part tutorial on making a simple tile pattern. Below is the result of that, including a link to my Artstation account which I really just solely made for the purpose of stalking my idols.

My empty Artstation

That's it for now. Probably will update within now and 6 months.

Kind regards,

Pim

ps. I've also updated my portfolio website, but since there's so little on there that I am actually happy with, I feel like I should just have it link to my Artstation page. Not sure yet what I'll do.