duber's blog

That’s right, I bought my first license of Mari a week or so ago and have been toying with it since.

I’ve been looking for a usable and flexible texture painting app aside from Cinema 4D or Deep Paint (is it still being developed?) that can take on really complex projections and meshes. The way Mari handles its project data and the textures is absolutely fabulous! Oh, and did I mention Mari also sports Python?

Originally I wanted to buy Mari prior to buying a license of Nuke X and Furnace, but then the job I would have needed Mari extensively for got cancelled, unfortunately, so I put it on hold. Then, recently, I saw Frank Rueter’s Nuke/Mari workflow video and immediately fell in love with the idea of software interoperability!

So, after playing with Mari for a few days and bugging the support team at The Foundry (about one undocumented feature of Mari’s command port), I now have everything I need to make Mari and 3ds Max communicate the same way as Frank demos with Nuke in his video.

Anyways, expect at least a preview of the things I’m about to do with Max and Mari in the near future. Stay tuned!

If you’re interested in a live demo or more information about the duber Python and Shotgun integration in 3ds Max, drop me a line via e-mail at: ldubeda[at]duber.cz

I’ve had a few customers and clients asked me specifically about getting Dictionaries from 3ds Max to Python using our 3ds Max Python plugin, but I wasn’t able to answer with an elegant or productive way of handling these data types in the MAXScript environment.

Until recently, I’ve been handling Dictionaries two ways:

1. String parsing (i.e. a very primitive way of handling foreign data types, not really recommended)
2. Manual wrapping (i.e. passing in a List or Array object and converting it back to a Dictionary object)

String parsing is the worst possible way of handling such an issue. It’s very cumbersome, highly unintuitive and with MAXScript string capabilities, extremely difficult. Manual wrapping, on the other hand, is rather more elegant, faster and you can use other, known, data types to construct your future Dictionary and have that converted in Python natively. The down side is, you have to be very careful with the way you’re handling the future Dictionary. The thing is, only a tuple of list pairs can be successfully converted to a Dictionary in Python. This is a bit limiting as we don’t have any specific way to tell what is a Tuple and what is a List in our Python implementation in MAXScript as there are no such data types available. So, what I did was I had an Array sent to Python (an actual .NET Array object, by the way) I had that converted first to a Tuple, which is pretty straight forward and then have that converted to a Dictionary. Worked fine, but it was a bit difficult to construct more complex Dictionaries, especially nested Dictionaries, in MAXScript.

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An example of the limitless possibilities how to customize your Deadline installation in order to make it work in your specific production pipeline.

Ok, it wouldn’t be the TD inside of me if I didn’t customize the game at least a tiny little bit before even starting to play.

So the absolutely first thing I did was to change the game’s language. I can’t stand Czech localization (though, admittedly, it was done very well in this particular example, to be perfectly honest). Unfortunately, there isn’t a super simple way for an average player to do this. You have to modify a config file called system.cfg, found in the root of the Crysis 2 installation (i.e. C:\Program Files\Crysis2).
In there, there’s a line that says g_language = Czech (in my case, obviously), simply rewrite the locale name to your pereference (mostly, probably, English).

After that was done, I started playing. Now, I have a 24″ widescreen monitor (as probably most of the people on the planet), which makes it even more baffling why the devs kept the default FOV option at 50 degrees?! I changed that to something more pleasant and “natural”, 70°. To do that, simply open up the game’s console by hitting the ~ key (delete the semicolon!) and type:

cl_fov = 70

or whatever value you like. Try several options which one will suite you best.

After this, you should also consider tweaking the near FOV (for drawing the weapons you hold etc…) and the sprint FOV (when you’re running). These are the commands (with my settings):

r_DrawNearFoV = 60
pl_movement.power_sprint_targetFov = 70

If you need to change anything else, try searching the web for the right command. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there is any particular command for listing all the available commands, so, this was just that.

I don’t feel the need to modify anything else anymore. Enjoy the awesome game!

An overview of the setup at the duber studio that I use for synchronizing and distributing plugins, scripts etc… on all my machines at the studio using Deadline and Dropbox.

Once again, after the promising IronPython Tools for Visual Studio 2010 were included in the installation of IronPython 2.7, I decided to give Visual Studio Express another shot. Well, VisualStudio Integrated Shell, to be exact, as Express doesn’t specifically support IronPython.

I’m fairly inexperienced with Visual Studio and also I don’t code very large script/programming projects, thus a full Visual Studio suite is a complete overkill for my needs, however, I really like Instellisense and Autocomplete features it offers, but mainly I really dig the Forms or XAML designers.

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To celebrate a new, fresh year ahead, I sat down and wrote a script that I’ve wanted to write for some time. A simple to use, yet powerful set of tools that’d help out anyone working in 3ds Max and Nuke to get the 3ds Max Cameras and locators (be it geometry, point helpers or anything between) to Nuke, flawlessly and with as little effort as possible.

So I condensed two essential functions into a single-click button in your toolbar. Watch the vieo above for a thorough description with examples.

The functionality could be described as Save To File and Copy To Clipboard methods. The first one will take all the selected objects and will generate a .chan file for each of them which can then be imported back in Nuke’s Axis or Camera nodes. The second one is pretty cool and rather powerful. I wrote a set of functions that take the selected objecs and generate a full Nuke script in the memory, which is then stored in the clipboard. A simple Ctrl+V in Nuke’s node editor will then paste in the generated Nuke script with all the Cameras and Axis nodes as they were in 3ds Max’s scene. Very cool, fast and useful for more complex comping in Nuke.

Anyways, the tools are licensed under the Creative Commons License, so, feel free to enhance and share the scripts as you like, as long as you give me credits for it.

DOWNLOAD, install by drag and dropping onto you 3ds Max scene. Don’t forget to copy the import_chan_file.tcl to your Nuke plugins directory.

Enjoy!

EDIT: If you’re having trouble installing the script using the .mzp installer, just open the NukeOps.mzp file with WinRAR or WinZIP (or directly in TotalCommander for example), extract the files and copy them to the appropriate folders of you 3ds Max installation (in my case it’s the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ folder):

• duber_NukeOps.mcr to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ui\usermacros
• NukeOps.ms to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\Scripts\Startup
• all the .BMP files to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ui\usericons

RSMB is a fantastic plugin that I use very often to speed up my renderings, however, there is one little glitch that almost made me go crazy! Hopefully I’ll be able to save you some time by explaining this issue and offering a fix in the video above.

Oooohhh… now this is nice!

I’m definitely going to give RV a good look, even though I deeply love FrameCycler.