I did this test animation to see how well my time-warping scripts worked on the SLS rig I bloged about in the previous post.
So far, I’m rather satisfied. 
Now onto the actual animation…
By the way, play the animation at full-screen, it’s in 720p! [b]ZOMG! SO MANY PIXELZ![/b]
I’m working on one of my personal projects and wanted to share with you a demo of a car rig I did for the project.
Oh, yeah, by the way, it’s gonna be a very original and one of a kind car spots. 
The rig sports a few basic features:
Nothing too fancy, but it’ll get the job done and didn’t take too long to rig. Here’s the preview:
As you might know there has been a significant change in the latest Shotgun API that’s somehow transparent to the CPython users, but presents a rather significant roadblock for IronPython users (including our duberPython bridge, that is based on the IronPython engine).
First, let’s discuss what’s changed in the API so dramatically that it breaks IronPython compatibility. It’s the introduction of a JSON formatting that requires a few specific CPython libraries that are not available in IronPython. The effect it has on CPython users is a faster data transfer to/from Shotgun, but other than that, the API looks to be unchanged from a user point of view. You still keep calling the same methods and you’re getting back the same objects. From IronPython point of view, you’ll hit a roadblock as there are a few modifications you’ll have to make to the Shotgun modules in order to make them run in IPy without issues.
As with my previous post, I’m preparing a few handy tools for 3ds Max artists using Mari and Nuke. This bit is the fun part with Nuke: live communication between 3ds Max and Nuke.
Stay tuned!
I’m starting to write a useful set of tools for Mari and 3ds Max users. This is the very beginning – establishing reliable communication from 3ds Max’s MAXScript console directly to Mari.
I’ll keep you posted.
We’ve launched a brand new website, courtesy of our friends at refresh.cz, with some latest finished projects showcase, including our new demoreel. Head over to duber.cz and leave a comment if you like, hell, even if you don’t like the new site. 
Thanks for watching!
I don’t think I have to praise regular expressions here, however, I wanted to point out one extremely useful case where regular expressions were pretty much the single most useful, fastest and not so obvious choice in my 3ds Max pipeline.
The thing with 3ds Max is that regular expressions are foreign to MAXScripters and they don’t usually use them. I too am more used to regex in Python or IronPython than MAXScript. However, since we do have access to .NET in MAXScript, we can use its Regex class inside MAXScript.
Why I’m mentioning this and why could it be useful to you? I bumped into a little issue with my pipeline’s handling of rendered files. They assume to be exactly the same as I set them up in 3ds Max, which is logical and correct. However, since I started using Deadline’s SMTD script for submitting my files to the render farm, which takes care of handling the path remapping and storing, it also accidentally took care of letter casing. So, in the end, my render files were being saved all upper cased: “\\SERVER\PROJECT\RENDERS\ABC.EXR” instead of what I set in the Render Dialog: “\\SERVER\Project\Renders\ABC.exr”. The reason was simple, I used simple MAXScript substituteString() method to re-map my local paths to my server, UNC, paths and I converted everything to upper case just in case I got a mismatch:
substituteString (toUpper srcPath) @"D:" @"\\RAMMSTEIN\__UNMANAGED_PROJECTS__"
I just updated to the final release of Deadline 5.1 after beta testing it for a few months and I couldn’t recommend any other render manager more. If you’re still on Deadline 5 or prior, this update is highly recommended! Especially since it boasts a full CPython support, tight Shotgun integration, draft, the ability to run multiple instances on one render node and much more. For more details, read the official announcement.
Here’s a video demonstrating the power and practical usage of Shotgun (data) brought over to 3ds Max natively via our Python plugin, duberPython.
I’ve been looking for the perfect phone since my good old Nokia 7650 I had in high school. It was a great phone, back then. Had a very comfy portrait keypad and a large screen. Since then I had a few more Nokias until finally switching to HTC phones. My first HTC was TyTN II, what a beast! Then, after the iPhone introduction, some more touch only or touch + type HTC phones. My last one was HD2. I loved and hated the phone equally.
