lighting, lookdev and compositing
After 3 years of Python scripting, I finally reached that point where I can confidently say that I roughly know, what I am doing. Then I fall in love with Katana and while interface and node graph stuff can be accessed/modified via Python, OpScripts are – for performance reasons – Lua based. Well, off to something new then. tongue I consider this blog post as a dynamic place that I will […] Read More
Maya & Scene Management While Maya gets more bells and whistles with every release it is still pretty useless in a production if there is no one, caring about all the data management. The problem is, if scene/cache imports, exports and versioning is done manually we tend to produce a big ugly mess. Especially if we are in a hurry. Nobody wants to spend time typing in data, prepare scenes, or […] Read More
I have never been a big fan of normal maps. It’s difficult to manipulate them, it’s hard to guess how they might influence your shading and – probably the worst part – it’s not possible to modify their strength in maya. This is why I avoided them most of the time in favour of bump maps even though normal maps can look a lot better. Luckily, I found this thread where NextDesign posted […] Read More
There are different types of grain nodes in nuke, but the problem is, while they may accuratly emulate specific types of filmgrain, they make your image – to put it mildly – really ugly. This is why I decided to create a “beautiful” grain gizmo. The key thing in my opinion is, that noise shouldn’t modify chroma, but luminance. I exposed knobs to control intensity and grain size (just a blur essentially). […] Read More
No matter what you are rendering, at the end of the day you probably need to setup a nuke comp, and shuffle your framebuffers/passes/AOVs – you name it, to recreate your beauty. This is why I wrote a little script that does this tedious job for you.
The most annoying thing on earth: The default camera gate in maya. It’s just wasting useful screen space and what the hell is this see through useful for? When I use camera gate I want to frame the shot and don’t want to get distracted by anything around it. So this is why I created a small script. I created a button and placed it in my shelf. Now I can toggle […] Read More
Every modern renderer has to deal with fireflies (very bright, nervously jumping around pixels). Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get rid of those and often enough very high sampling just isn’t an option within tight deadlines.