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