After nearly 3 years of MotionBuilder in both preproduction & full blown production, my team has collected a hefty list of Mobu’s kinks & quirks. Some of these we have solutions/wrappers for, others we are actively working through, and some we’ve brought up to the powers at be.
“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion.”
-Simon Sinek.
Deleting Objects *Safely
MotionBuilder is really great at a lot of things. However, deleting objects is not one of those things. Piggy backing off of this blog post by Marcus Krautwurst, deleting often requires custom/order of operation sensitive scripting.
Skonverter
What is Skonverter?
Skonverter is quick little tool I wrote over my Thanksgiving break from work @ Volition. I needed something to keep my brain active and I’ve been meaning to at least try my hand at a skinning converter. ( Converting non skin cluster based deformation into skin cluster based deformation. ) Most of the ones I have seen online are awesome and I wanted to have my own. I figured if I ended up writing something that worked fairly well, I’d open it up to the community to learn along side me, because it’s far from done. So if you’re interested in skin conversion/looking to learn more or simply just want to use the tool, read on!
Renaming Blendshape Targets
Came across an issue when I tried to use the renameAttr command to rename targets on a blendshape node in Maya. After a lot of digging, it didn’t seem like anyone had a solid solution in Python written out.
Here’s the one that I wrote up for my purposes, feel free to use…
ThreeDRobot : Automating Twitter
I’m really into Twitter, I’m also really into automation & procedural content. What better side project than to try my hand at a twitter bot?
@ThreeDRobot was my attempt at this.
EDIT 2017: Since this post was written, @ThreeDRobot has been taken offline for maintenance and improvement. While it was running it amassed a crisp 972 followers (which is way more than my personal account, not that I’m comparing or anything.)
Similar to @GameDevRobot, @ThreeDRobot’s goal is to foster a sense of community and conversation around topics related to 3D art and computer graphics. Whether it’s on Reddit or on Twitter, I want people to feel more connected in the 3D graphics community, especially when networking is critical to success. Being able to post to a hashtag like #3Dmodeling or #3Dprinting and knowing that there’s a good chance it’ll be seen by hundreds of people even if your follower count is pretty low; that’s the goal.
SplashBoard – Images in Maya Made Easy!
I figured I’d make a vlog for this post! Hope you enjoy a sneak peak** into the development into SplashBoard!
**I post about it all the time on Twitter, very little sneaking involved.