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I stumbled upon this little QuickLook component that works great with Maya IFF images. Then, I couldn’t find it again when I needed it so I’m sharing it here. The original page also has support for a few other obscure formats. But anyway here are the main goods:

IFF Graphics Importer 1.0 for OS X

For anyone who doesn’t know, this will also enable thumbnail previews in Finder and IFF sequences to be loaded in QuickTime player. For lots of other QL plugins, check out this site. If you’re a total noob and not sure what to do with this, unpack the .zip file and put the .qlgenerator file in your /Library/QuickLook folder for all users (or ~/Library/QuickLook for just you) then restart Finder and voila! You should be able to see and load IFFs. I did, however see some weird glitches when trying to load an IFF sequence in to Motion.

QuickLook is such a cool technology and a great reason to use Mac OS. While you’re adding plugins I’d also recommend the EPS, CHM, QLColorCode and Suspicious Package qlgenerators.

I’m currently modelling a high-resolution human female in Modo, with a little help from Maya. Here is my current work-in-progress… This is basically a low-poly smoothed base mesh before any detailing or texturing. Please feel free to critique. I’m taking my time with this to do it to a level where I’m really satisfied. Minimal reference, mostly anatomy diagrams. One contiguous piece, all quads. About 12000 polys unsmoothed and 195000 in the render. Costume design is in my head still, but it will happen.

If you ask me, the pinnacle of Adobe software was in the late 1990s. Since then their tools have mostly just become slower and more awkward. I knew when it happened, the 2005 buy-out of their biggest corporate rival Macromedia, wouldn’t be good for users of their products.

The reality is Adobe CS is king for a reason. Many reasons. It does handle many specific tasks and it does have the critical mass of professional users and studios behind it. To Adobe’s success and credit, they do try to offer multimedia tools for every side of the creative market.

With so many open source and independant alternatives, and the dawn of Microsoft’s new Expression suite and Silverlight platform, does this spell-out the slow decline of one of software history’s giants? (more…)

Want to resize a folder of images for the web? The quickest and easiest way by far is with ImageMagick.

First, make sure you have it installed…

• On Ubuntu/Debian:
  sudo apt-get install imagemagick
• On Mac OS X:
  follow the instructions here
• On Windows:
  download it from here

This makes commands like convert and mogrify available…

Now open a Terminal and change to the directory containing the files you want to manipulate, then execute the following:

mogrify -resample 72 -quality 66% *.jpg

You can substitute other values if you prefer.. For a complete list of options see the ImageMagick documentation.

Warning, this will overwrite the files in your directory. If you had images in a different format, and/or wanted to convert them to smaller, lossy versions, you could try something like this:

mogrify -resize 25% -quality 66% -format jpg *.png

This will make copies of your resized images next to the originals in that same folder (Windows users may have problems using the * for batch file manipulations however).

That’s it! This really is the quickest and easiest way to resample a whole bunch of images.

Attended the debut meeting of Toronto’s new mental ray user group. I was thrilled to learn about this formation on the official mailing list a few weeks ago.

Thanks again to Brian and Mark from Guru Studio for their interesting and informative presentation, and of course the sponsors. I hope to look forward to many more!

For anyone who may be looking, here are some Maya icons in SVG and PNG formats. I couldn’t find any on the net so I just ripped these from a PDF file on the Alias website. They especially look great on your Gnome desktop.

Here is a quick animated short I created for broadcast in Toronto optical stores. It features a toon-shaded clumsy robot who just can’t see where he’s going. The reason for no audio and the comic-book style sound effects are because it was to be played silently as in-store video signage.

Blind robot from D. Starr on Vimeo.

Here’s a character mascot face I made for Sarolta. She is a bookish, librarian or teacher type, dominant yet still cute and sexy.

She was sub-d modeled, toon-shaded and rigged for animation in Maya, and rendered in mental ray.

Here are the absolute basics for using the mental ray contour shaders for a cartoon style surface in Maya 5.

1. Set environment variable MAYA_MRFM_SHOW_CUSTOM_SHADERS to 1 if you haven’t already done so. This will allow you to see the mental ray nodes in Maya’s UI. Restart Maya.
2. Go to mental ray render globals. Under contours you must choose a contrast and store shader.
3. Create a new contour_contrast_function_levels node and connect the outValue to miDefaultOptions.contourContrast
4. Next create a new contour_store_function node and connect the normal_geom to miDefaultOptions.contourStore.
5. Make a new material. Assign it to your geometry. Select it’s Shading Group node. Under the mental ray tab create a new contour shader. They are all pretty cool so read the help and see which one suits you best.
6. Select the camera you want to render from. Assign a contour output shader to it. Usually contour_composite works well, depending on your needs. Your contour_composite.outValue should be connected to your camera’s miOutputShader attribute.

There are many settings you need to tweak because the defaults are usually useless. I may create a MEL script to automate this process but this should be much easier to accomplish in the new Maya 6, so I will just wait for that.

If you need more elaboration on this subject, check out the Fenriz site.