motion graphics, art, design, 3D, tutorials and whatever else I feel like writing about.

I’m using Maya 2012 64-bit on Mac OS X, and there are often times when I can not figure out why the batch renderer is taking so damn long to render my frames. One project for example was taking on average 1.5 minutes per frame in Maya’s native Render View, yet that same frame took almost 11 minutes PER FRAME when I rendered via the Batch Renderer. What’s up with that Autodesk?!

After many hours of trying to troubleshoot it I gave in and found Mr. Irakli Kublashvili’s IK Render View Batch Renderer. It is a simple MEL file that you copy to your scripts folder, then in Maya you type “IK_renderViewBr;” to launch a nice dialog box that allows you to pick the folder, start and end frames, frame size and other relevant options for your IK Render View Batch Render. Once you click on the Render button it renders each frame in Maya’s Render View window, when the frame is complete it saves it to the folder you specify, and automatically starts the next frame continuing until it reaches the end frame.

Major props to Irakli for creating this. A project that would have taken roughly 36 hours to render with Maya’s Batch Renderer finished in the more appropriate 5-6 hours I originally had expected. I hope this helps some of you!

Visit Irakli’s site here

Download the plugin from Creative Crash here

Often times I find that clients or co-workers are using older versions of Maya software which can create a headache at time of delivery.  Here’s a quick tip to “downgrade” the Maya scene file.

For example:  I have a Maya 2009 project that needs to work in Maya 2008.  It uses nCloth which was available in 2008 so we are golden there.

• Save the Maya 2009 scene file as a .MA (Maya Ascii file format)
• Open it in any text editor and make sure it’s in plain text format.
• Find the lines of code that reference the Maya version number like this:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
requires maya "2009";

• And simply comment out the lines at the beginning of the file by adding two slashes “//”:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
//requires maya "2009";

There is a new method since the Maya 2008 release (I think that’s when they started this). If you click on File > Open Scene > Option Box, you’ll see a little checkbox to “ignore version“. Much easier this way.

NOTE: If you are using nodes that are exclusive to a new release, this will not work or at least the exclusive nodes will not import.  That will require a little trial and error.

Stumbled upon a super helpful script for After Effects and Maya.  It’s called MoCon and you can download MoCon here.

If you are trying to bring locators from Maya into After Effects, or camera data this is a very important tool to have. I especially enjoy the fact that you can simply select any object in Maya, type “pass2obm” and save it to a file.  Once in After Effects you can simply import the OBM file and it populates layers with white locators for each object.  After Effects has the ability to bring in .ma files from Maya, but the nulls have to be named null, and they are imported in as a hidden null object.  The MoCon script works with any naming convention, and creates small solid layers for easy visualization.

Check out 3Dmation here.

Have you ever tried to save a Maya scene as a .ma (maya ascii) file and received the following message?

Error: File contains unknown nodes or data.  To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed.

The tough part is figuring out what is an “unknown” node. To list the “unknown” nodes in any Maya scene simply type the following.

ls -type unknown;

This will list all “unknown” nodes in the script editor. Then replace the X’s with the name of the unknown node and hit enter:

delete XXXXXX

If someone knows of a simpler method to remove all unknown nodes let me know.