Dev Guardead

An update to Backburner For Maya

2015-05-28T08:23:53Z

I guess we all expected to get an update to this tool which is free and lately got pretty stable.

Whenever I was using Backburner for Maya I had to use a Custom Command even for some very simple option, so one day I said, Ok That’s Enough.

From that moment I started making some changes to the script and made more options available in the UI. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve started doing this in production environment so I’ve tested it a lot. A couple of weeks ago I thought maybe it’s a good idea to share it with you guys. Then I thought OK, let’s add the Find Missing Frames Tool functionality to it as well.

To sum it up, my contributions to this tool are:

1. Better Job Name to start with.
2. Better Description including “Project Name” and “Scene Name” for better job tracking.
3. Added an option to Distribute Tiles as multiple jobs.
4. Multiple Frame Range input.
5. Auto generation of frame ranges for submitting Missing Frames.
6. Ability to change Output Resolution.
7. Calculate total number of frames and tasks.
8. Default timeout changed.
9. Added support for SolidAngle’s Arnold.
10. Backburner For Maya now can list other registered renderers correctly as well.
11. Better layout.

You can download the performExportToBackburner.zip file and extract it, put the .mel file in Maya’s scripts folder and your done. It will replace the old tool’s functionality so when you choose Create Backburner Job… from Render menu inside Maya the new one will run.

I’ve made some changes to the UI as well that you may find it a bit unfamiliar so I’ll explain them here.

1. The Generate buttons:

They simply regenerate the Job Name and the Description which are based on scene name, Render Settings’s Version option, Project Name and Scene path.

2. Frame Range:

It simply allows you to send multiple frame ranges at once. You can enter something like this:

17,21-36,44,112-140,202

To specify a range you have to use “-“(dash) and to separate two ranges you have to use “,”(Comma)

Also you have to avoid using spaces or any character other than Numbers, Dash and Comma.

Next to the frame range text box there is a number which shows the total amount of frames, Just for fun ;).

And finally, a button that I marked with a red square around it in the above image which allows you to pick an existing frame of a sequence and then it asks you to give a frame range and then fills the Frame Range text box with the missing frames as ranges so you can only send missing frames if there are any.

3. Resolution:

You can render images with a different size other than what is set in the render settings considering the device aspect ratio.

4. Distribute Tiles:

You can divide each frame into specific number of rows and columns and send each tile as one job. This comes real handy when you want to render out the final quality very very fast or you have a huge image size or if your render far is not capable of handling an entire frame because of memory.

To merge the rendered tiles back to original image you can use Nuke or Fusion (these are the ones I know that do the job). For example in Nuke, Just import your images into nuke, select them all and press “m”. it will create a merge node and connects all of the tiles to it which also works with sequences.

Remember to set “Also merge” attribute in the merge node to “All” to have all of your embedded passes merged as well in case your image type is EXR.

That’s it. I guess the rest is very easy to get used to.

If you find any bugs, strange behavior or if you think a New Feature can make it better please feel free to write a comment and I’ll be more than happy to do my best about it.

Cheers

Finding missing frames in a sequence

2015-05-26T09:05:26Z

It’s very annoying to face missing frames when you come back to work, happy and hopeful to pass the renders to the comp department. And it’s even more annoying when those missing frames have no logical order. Yes, you have no time and of course no interest what so ever to sit in front of the monitor and find them between lots and lots of files.

For windows users, this little tool makes things a lot easier.

Inside the FindMissingFrames.zip file you will find a .reg file which adds the tool to the windows explorer’s context menu. In order to do that you need to copy the dev_FindMissingFrames.bat file into C:\ and run the FindMissingFrames.reg as administrator. After it’s done, you can right-click on any existing frame of the target sequence and choose Find Missing Frames. After it runs, it gives you basic information about the frame you have picked and asks you for the frame range that you want it to examine e.g 1-2110.

As an alternative, you can just drag and drop one of the existing frames over the batch file itself.

In addition to the output you see in the batch window itself, it creates a missing_frames.txt file in the sequence folder. This file contains the same result but laid out a bit better.

There is only one limitation here and that is the position of the frame number in the frame name itself. It has to follow this pattern:

what_ever_the_name_is.frameNumber.extension

the frame number should also follow a constant padding for example:

outRender_v04.00045.exr

outRender_v04.00826.exr

outRender_v04.52375.exr

etc…

…And, if you found any bug or have any suggestion, don’t forget to please leave your comments. I’ll be more than happy to reply to them.

Cheers

file Node AE Browse Button fix

2015-04-24T09:04:09Z

This is a very simple fix to the behavior of file node’s browse button in Maya.

You most probably know that when you have file node pointing to even a correct path in your project and you press the browse button, the open file dialog comes up pointing to an irrelative path.

This gets really annoying sometimes…

So, I started to dig in and see why.

The reason for this is that when the file path is relative to the current project path, the textBox does not show the exact path. The command that opens up the Open dialog and lets you pick a file, searches for the content of this textBox and obviously because it can’t find it, it sets the starting folder of the Open dialog to the sourceImages folder or the last folder that you have opened a texture from.

It’s sometimes really really annoying so I decided to fix it and came up with this very very simple MEL code.

After downloading the AEfileTextureBrowser.zip file, extract it’s content which is a .mel file and put it in Maya’s scripts folder and restart Maya.

That’s it, there is no need to run anything inside Maya to make this work.

It will fix the problem automatically.

Dock Outliner

2016-05-25T11:38:52Z

After such a long time…

I was always asking myself why Outliner is not dock-able like “Attribute Editor” for instance. And this question led me to this recent little MEL I wrote that changes the Outliner’s behavior and gives you more room to manage your layouts.

In the beginning I faced a couple of problems, and here are the solutions I found:

Maya crashing when you try to open Outliner from Window menu. Which I ended up changing the Outliner menu item’s underlying command.
Outliner disappear after opening a Maya Scene or a New Scene. Which I fixed by running two scriptJobs that re-parent the outlinerPanel to the control in any of those two situations.
Filter text box not working after moving the OutlinerWindow content under the dockedControl. The Trick that I used for this was to move outlinerPanel‘s content to the OutlinerWindow that I created after docking the window itself and that’s because of the internal disconnection between the Filter text box command and the Outliner contents path simply because when the outlinerPanel is being created the connection is also being made, so if you change the path afterwards they don’t see each other anymore.

After extracting the contents of the dev_dockOutliner.zip file, put the .mel file into Maya’s scripts folder. you also have to add the two following lines to userSetup.mel file.

evalDeferred -low "dev_dockOutliner";
evalDeferred -lp "dev_outlinerMenuItem";

I also have to mention that if you have BonusTools installed you first need to make sure you have the following line in the userSetup.mel file and of-course this goes with any other Maya Plug-in that tries to run in startup with the help of userSetup.mel.

bonusToolsMenu;

About This blog…

2015-01-15T22:32:56Z

Hi,

This is the first post so I think it’s better to talk about what we’re going to expect from this blog.

This blog is aimed to share some of my experiences in Scripting, Shading, Lighting and Rendering.

The main applications will be: Autodesk Maya, nVidia Mental Ray, Solid Angle Arnold (MtoA) and The Foundry Nuke (as color management and render layer compositing solution).

I’ll try my best to share things that I find valuable in this carrier like Tips (Useful and sometimes critical information from the documentations and release notes), Tricks (Things that look odd but work perfectly in specific situations) and Creative Workflows (Thinking different and getting the most out of the software) and I’ll appreciate all sorts of discussions regarding to this title,

Hope we all learn from each other and experience new thoughts and approaches in our way to make thing easier and more fun ;).

Thank you…