Finally took the time to write my first pymel script! Until now, everything I've written has been MEL scripts or standalone python with nothing tying it into Maya. This script is the first python script that works with Maya. Being python, it's much easier than MEL to write, as far as syntax or just trying to get something to evaluate! But, because its using pymel, it has the utility of MEL because it can use all the same commands and tools through interfacing with Maya.

In short: the power of pymel is that anything you can do in the Maya application, you can code your script to do! Create and manipulate polygons and meshes, create/assign shaders, anything! You can access the way the application displays things in the viewport, or even do things like select objects, undo, or even access and alter the storage of that data!


In fact, I had to do most of those things in this script! This script is for generating a Renderable Skeleton!

When you select one or more joints (for example, the root joint of a skeleton) and run the script in Maya's Script Editor, the script will iterate over the entire joint hierarchy of each joint selected and a sphere for each joint and cones for each bone length between that joint and its child joints. It also creates a Lambert shader colored like the joint is colored in the viewport after it was bound to a mesh.


You can see an example of the results in this scrap!




A few caveats, though:
[+] It's not the fastest thing, or the best written; it is my first one after all. I'm pretty sure I've got the kinks worked out, but it did occasionally cause crashes or freeze Maya, so be sure to save before using it. I think it was caused by keeping some of the beefier dictionary structures outside of method defs; I think Maya might keep them in memory, where as python will discard them from memory when the methods complete.
[+] I use a few clunky tricks to get pymel to do what I want. In these cases, I couldn't really figure out another way to do it. But, I am certain there is a better way to get the transform node... I LOVE comments, so I tried to keep notes on what things do what.
[+] I do my best to keep it from creating duplicate spheres/cones/shaders during execution, but if you run it again without undoing, you're going to get duplicates. So delete or undo the shaders and polys if you don't want your scene getting cluttered up!
[+] They're in methods now and I haven't seen it crash again. Also, these will be parented to your skeleton, so if you move the joints around and pose your skeleton, the sphere/cones will move too.
[+] It doesn't do so well with joints that have different scale values. You can see that in the tail of the example. You'll also notice that the tail joints are oddly scaled in the right side. You can remove the scaling in the script by finding the line of the assignment of the sphere's scale and removing it.
[+] Yes, I had to have some help :P I had no idea how to figure out the length the cones should be for the bone lengths.


Working with Maya is confusing as it was in MEL scripts, but thankfully python saves from the frustrating syntax of MEL. There's a lot to think about when working through how to make PyMel do what you want. If anyone has any questions on this script or just pymel in general, or even ideas on how to do something in it, I'd be happy to help! Can't promise I'll know the answer, though...


So, what do you think?

You might have heard me mention this game before, but Armello's now out of early access and on Steam! They've really cleaned up the graphics and improved the sound from what they offered in the Kickstarter's beta. Since I backed the Kickstarter, I get access to the Bandit clan DLC's characters. Originally the bandit clan was only going to be available to those who back the Bandit Tier on Kickstarter (like myself) but that hardly would have been fair! :P Although, it doesn't look like the bandit DLC is available on for purchase, yet. Or maybe I'm just not really looking.

I'm having a lot of fun with Scarlet the Fox, so far! I can't wait to try the other new characters; there are 8 (up from 4 in the beta) in the base game and the Bandit clan adds 4 more. Anybody else checkout this game yet?

My copy of Adobe ImageReady CS2 is getting a bit long in the tooth and can't handle the stuff I try to do without lots of crashing and running out of memory. It's time to find something newer. But, I have little idea of any good .gif making software. So far I have tried GIMP, but its native animation tools are terrible. I haven't tried this GAP toolset I've read about, but from what I've read of it, it won't be enough to make it comfortable to use like ImageReady.

What I need are simple basics:

[+] The ability to import multiple files into a series of frames, with separate layering capabilities.
[+] I should be able to apply a given layer across all frames without enabling it in every frame.
[+] I need to be able to select and operate on multiple frames or layers at the same time, rather than an all or one approach.
[+] It would be nice if it could make flash or export to .avi and other file types, as well as .gif.
[+] I prefer standalone applications; I'm not a fan of web apps.

If you use animation/gif-making software that doesn't meet some/any of the conditions above, I'd still love to hear about them! Tell me what you like about them, what you don't like, and why you use them.

Thank God it wasn't a tumor.

My brother ended up in the hospital over the weekend, due to near-vision-loss causing migraines. For about half a day, all we knew was "they found something on the MRI." Thankfully, it turned out to be intracranial pressure from excess cerebral-spinal fluid. Apparently the valve-thing that drains it doesn't function properly. He had to have surgery and will have to have a subdermal tube-thingy drain excess into his abdomen for the rest of his life, but at least it wasn't brain cancer. Surgery is done now, everything went well and he's recovering. Should be released tomorrow or the day after.

*Whew* that was a scary couple of days!

Real science published in a real science journal and presented on a science news site as actual science:

http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=5780

Now, I love me some science. I understand that recording methodology is extremely important for repeatability (hell, I'm a huge fan of doing it myself!) I know that 81% of real science is plain and boring methodology, repeating tests, and so forth and breakthroughs are like ~0.01% of science. I also understand the pressures that journalists and news publishers are under to make everything sounds important and dramatic.

But, I couldn't help but get a kick out of how phys.org presented something that is so normal to me like it's a breakthrough!

Still, good on Dr. Giuseppe Montesanto for helping to bring his field into the modern age!

The thread poll is only open until Thursday!

I really appreciate your thought's on the face! If you don't have a forum account and don't want to register, feel free to provide your choice, and any thoughts, in this journal. At the time of writing, it's tied up 2-2 between options B and C!

Right around now, the New Horizons spacecraft is making it's closest approach to Pluto! Nasa TV has a number of events lined up, today and tomorrow. You can check out it's uStream here: http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

Of course, being so far away, transmissions takes about 9 hours. Wanna get a good feel for just how big that kind of space is? Scroll on through If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel if you have the time! Also, be sure to check out NASA.gov for all the images they've already collected and keep an eye out for more to come!

Happy fourth of July everybody and a merry normal day to all our international friends, too!

There was quite a rainstorm recently, while I was at the office. The roof is one of those ill-conceived flat ones that basically ends up creating a wading pool when it rains heavily. The building's pretty old (but really quite nice, actually) so it seems to constantly have problems (thematically quite appropriate for Megacorp, really.) So, during this very heavy short period rain, the ceiling down at the end of the hall sprung a leak. I don't mean a little drip-drip leak, this was like a mini-rainstorm in doors. We gathered up 8 or more cubicle trash cans to put under it, while someone ran to inform admin, but it was still going all over the floor and filling them up fast. 3 ceiling tiles eventually collapsed and the guy in the cube next to it had to move over one for a bit.

Really it was altogether hilarious.

There was actually one other time something like this has happened, a few years back when a leaking AC collapsed the ceiling tiles over my own cube!

Reposting from  Neko-Maya's journal.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/.....move-adult-ads

I support the removal of the new porn ads. This seems like an excellent opportunity for IMVU and FA management to demonstrate receptiveness towards community concerns.

Apparently, scraps show up in subscriber's notification queues! Would not have guessed that, based on the name "scraps". To be honest, had I known this in the first place, I probably wouldn't have posted almost any of my scraps on FA at all. But now that I have almost 300 submissions, all but 34 of which are scraps, and apparently you guys are OK with them showing up in your lists I guess I'm OK with it too. So, I guess I'll just keep the status quo and continue to make progress scraps with the occasional gallery post.

---

Since it's your notification queue, I feel like it's worth asking:

Are there any kind of progress scraps that you find I use to often, but would otherwise be ok with seeing? How often would you care?

Are there any kind of progress scraps that you don't like seeing at all?

Do you read scrap descriptions? Always/Sometimes/Rarely/Custom(and why)

What would you think if instead of putting progress images right into scraps, I uploaded them to the gallery and moved them to scraps after a set period of time?

The Megacorp promoted me

I don't know what a C2 is, but I'm one of them now. My employee ID doesn't have authorization to view the Corporate Processes Handbook (seriously) but dictionary.com suggests it might mean "a skilled manual worker, or a manual worker with responsibility for other people." Sounds about right, except maybe the manual part. What would be an automatic worker? Are there semi-automatic workers? There ought to be a law against those unsafe semi-automatic workers!

I don't really know what prompted this, but it might have been for a certification I earned. I hope this doesn't mean I'll have to do a bunch of traveling. Do I get underlings now? Do I have to grow a comb-over? I guess I could shave my head down the middle. I don't think anything is going to really change immediately, but they have been asking a lot of spooky "where do you see yourself in the future" questions lately. I always have trouble with those sorts of questions because I want to answer them in a way that plays well with the company's plans, but I never seem to know what those plans are. So, I try to make my response multiple choice. I guess that kind of fits well, I like to learn just about anything and I only have a vague idea of where I'm trying steer my career. It always has served me well to dabble in a wide range of things and pickup specialties when I was forced to or really enjoyed stuff. You know, be flexible and take things as they come; have a ton of tools in the toolbox so you can take advantage of any opportunities instead of focusing on a single path. I figured the same sort of strategy would be appropriate for my career. Holy crap, I have a real career; I've never considered working for Megacorp as anything more than a job.

In all seriousness though, despite my usual reservations and fear, I'm actually kind of excited about this.

My little corner of the megacorp's network has been down since yesterday, that is to say about 400 people are without internet. With nothing that can be done on my part (I'm not a networking guy) and nothing more I can do without the network, I took the rest of the day off! Kind of helps make up for the fact that I'll be staying after hours monitoring a new deployment soon. Despite the regularity of such baffling ineptitude, it never ceases to amaze me that a company so big (200,000 people worldwide and counting) can fail at such basic infrastructure and other assorted things.

1. Have enough evil plans in motion to benefit no matter what the outcome of the situation.
2. Brag evilly about how 'everything is going according to plan!"
3. Cackle evilly! MWAHAHAHAHA!

I don't follow CGI industry news much, being more of a hobbyist, so it was to my great surprise and disappointment that I learned this week that Autodesk (and with it, Maya) was discontinuing perpetual licensed offerings by the end of the year in favor of a subscription model. Yes, pay them forever or lose all access to the software; another Adobe-style approach. They didn't even have the guts to make it cheaper than the price of upgrading to the next version they used to do. Sure, you'd no longer pay the exorbitant upfront cost, but honestly was it so wrong to want to keep access to the software if I didn't want to upgrade? The thought of losing access to the key enabler of my favorite (and lets face it, only) hobby just because I lose my job or retire and can no longer afford yearly payments disturbs me. I understand that they target businesses and I'm a hobbyist, but it's depressing none the less. The take a laser-like focus on their target market, sacrificing everything else to use a business model optimized for the best case user.

What's worse is they didn't even have the decency to offer one last upgrade, for old times sake, to the last version that will be available under perpetual license: Maya 2016. The 2016 version is only available via subscription or the same old full price for the perpetual license. It's a pity really, I made the huge leap from 2009 to 2015 by buying the whole thing and when I finally feel confident in my finances enough to actually want to upgrade yearly (probably) they change the deal and sour my whole outlook on it. Looks like, as with Photoshop CS2, Maya 2015 will be the end of the road for me. Of course, given that I'm still stubbornly using CS2, Maya 2015 has a long life left in it!

A real shame. Maya 2016 finally introduces multi-core+GPU support of rig evaluation, which would be a tremendous boost to speed an responsiveness. I really wanted to upgrade to that.


I remember when you purchased software products, instead of just a license. My first 3D modeling software suite was Simply 3D 3, it cost $100 and I had begged my parents for it for my birthday present; I traded out having any other presents. I was a weird kid. But now-a-days, stripping us of our ownership rights in favor of licensing terms isn't enough; they steal away our very use of the thing if we ever stop paying them! I hate subscription-ware more than just about anything else. Piece by piece we surrender our rights and sell ourselves into digital serfdom!

OK, maaaaybe I'm being a bit dramatic (hey, part 'n parcel of being a furry, no?)

Never the less, it's a sad trend that is terribly successful with no real end on the horizon. Automakers are wringing their hands over the opportunity to do the same thing and kill off after-market mods outside their ability to charge for. You can bet all these "automated" car concepts will introduce some variation on the subscription song and dance to entice people away from car ownership. Maybe that's all well and good if you live in certain cities where you don't need to own a car, but a one-business-model-fits-all approach like Autodesk is forcing would try to drag us all along with it. Then again, who know: maybe 3D printing will advance enough to offer a Blender-style free alternative car! Hah! I would totally download a car...

Anybody else play this game? I love it! I prefer singleplayer. What's your favorite hero/play style? Thane is my favorite to play as.

OF SNOW, I MEAN! 6 inches of snow.

...

Anyways, the snowblower took care of it, but I'm not going to be able to do a bunch of errands I planned today. Probably should have done my grocery shopping before this thing hit.

*Shrug* More time for modeling work! I'm making surprising progress on the fur front and it has proved a real distraction from the paw shape work I had planned. I wish I could find more resources and tutorials for Maya's old fur system. I can only find a handful of blog posts and such and they're all 5+ years old. I suppose most of it shouldn't have changed. But, I see a lot of them (including the manual for Maya, which seems to be out of date in some sections) saying never to use raytracing with Volume Fur. I can't for the life of me figure out why, exactly. Sure, it's slow, but 6 minutes per frame would only be a problem for me if I were animating it. If I switch it to rasterizer like they say to, by using the legacy rasterizer and disable the raytracing, everything looks extremely ugly; I'd have to do a bunch of work to customize shaders for use with them.

Perhaps speed is the only reason; I notice that if I switch to legacy rasterizer but leave raytracing enabled, the same frame takes 39 minutes instead of 6! Curiously, if I keep it set to the unified sampler but still disable the raytracing, the scene takes 30 seconds, but looks virtually identical to the raytraced image (minus a few caustic effects and brightness of the eyes) so it makes for an amazing preview and really speeds up experimentation!

The mouse has been caught! The bold little creature got a bit too bold. I was watching a video and working on my model, when I heard rustling in the trash can beside me. It was dark in the room, but I saw motion. It avoided* all my traps (even when I sweetened the Peanut Butter no-kill traps with a dollop of butter!) Yet it couldn't escape my trashcan. I took it outside and tipped it to let it out. Rather than run off into the woods, it ran under my deck. Crap.

I had recently purchased some Pest Spray. This noxious combination is only an irritating deterrent, non-poisonous, composed of things like wintergreen oil and rancid egg yolks. Ick, does it ever stink! I'm pretty sure spraying around the dryer vent that appears to be how it got in, is what drove it into the basement. So, now that it's outside, I've sprayed the malodorous concoction around the outside on anything that could possibly server as an entrance. Especially the outside of the vent.

All told, the chubby (serious fat, it clearly couldn't have fit in my no-kill traps) little thing was kinda cute, if you ignore the diseases and the pooping everywhere.

It's quite clear, there's a mouse in my house. I can see the signs, but cannot catch it. It's smart enough (or maybe just fat enough) to avoid the no-kill traps, which I baited with chunky peanut butter (who could resist such a dish?!)

As I recall, mice leave little pellet dropping just about everywhere they travel, which is why it's quite strange that I can't track down where it's getting in. I have my hunches, but placing traps around them have had no success. Given there are no pellets around those areas, I'm guessing my hunches suck. The only one that did have pellets, was the sink garbage disposal. My most recent trap, baited with an extra helping, yielded one pellet outside its entrance but no mousey.

I'm getting really tired of all the soap and scrubbing (still unclean... still unclean...) Any ideas for catching the crafty creature?

Happy New Year, everybody!

Augh! Sewage is backing up into my basement! AGAIN!

Quick! The scrub brush! Ah! There's too much! I need to buy a Wet/Dry shop vac! ($50 later) The 6 gallon wasn't enough, should have bought the 9 gallon! Quick, dump the poo water down the sump pump! Must not put the solid stuff down or I'll clog that one too! AHH! IT"S STARTING TO TOUCH THE CARPETING!

... 4 6-Gallon dumps later, the flood has subsided, leaving only solids and panic...

Oh lawd, it's everywhere! (It's in my raccoon wounds!) Call Roto Rooter! Help, am I still under guarantee from the last visit?! You'll be here 4-6 hours from now?! Blargh! Suck up the solids and dump them in the woods! Clean out the shop vac! Spray 80 bottles of Lysol! Contemplate buying a carpet shampooer! Complain about it on the Internet while you wait for Super Mario to show up and save the day!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everybody out there!

Picked up a fun little, old game called "Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb". I stumbled upon it when I accidentally clicked the casual category on Steam. Recently added to Steam, the game was originally released in 1994. Sounded like a fun little concept and I figured I haven't played a good ol' fashion point 'n click Adventure game in decades!

You play as a Fox "morph" named Rif that has been accused of stealing an ancient human artifact used to predict the weather. Paired with an Elk and a Boar, your job is to solve the mystery of who stole this 'Orb of Storms' in time to save your girlfriend (and yourself) from execution.

So far, pretty good for $6 (although I got it during the current steam sale for $4.49) and 8-bit (maaaybe 16-bit) graphics. The dialog is pretty good and I've got to be honest, I was surprised by the quality of the voice acting. Voice acting in modern games is always one of those things that almost feels like it's expected to be bad, so this was quite refreshing. So far the puzzles are easy, but I have hit at least one difficult one, so perhaps it's too early to tell.

I've also spent some time with the backer's beta for Armello! Lovin' it so far! Hmm, that makes two casual in less than a month. I must be getting old; neither the time nor that energy for hardcore games anymore. Ah well, more time for modeling work, if I don't dump 30+ hours into Europa Universalis IV just to play through a single campaign! Spending 45-60 min in Armello is fits much better into my schedule.


Anybody else checked out any of these games yet? What did you think?