Author Archives: Eric B

Maya batch render slowness? Welcome IK Render View Batch Render

16th
Dec. × ’11

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 [...]

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After Effects warning: Unable to create font

31st
May. × ’11

I noticed a strange error while trying to open a project I created on OS X 10.6.6, right after upgrading to 10.6.7 and applying the Snow Leopard Font Update. When launching After Effects CS5 it popped up a dialog error message stating After Effects warning: Unable to create font. I searched Google and found that [...]

Posted in After Effects | 21 Comments

After Effects CS5 Update / 10.0.2

21st
Apr. × ’11

Finally Adobe has fixed a few annoying issues with After Effects CS5 with their newest 10.0.2 update. I recently imported a CS3 project that used Trapcode’s Particular plugin version 2.0. I did not have that plugin installed in CS5 and it popped up a persistent “unexpected data type” error message. Instead of it nicely popping [...]

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After Effects error: making file specification – no such volume (-35)

1st
Mar. × ’10

Have you come across this error before in After Effects? After Effects error: making file specification – no such volume (-35) Yeah, it sucks.  Well, today was my first time experiencing this error.  I was opening an archived After Effects project, and as soon as it started to open I saw the error message.  I [...]

Posted in After Effects, Mac Stuff | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Opening Maya projects from a newer version in older versions.

16th
Jan. × ’10

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 [...]

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Gmail Notifier for Mac not checking mail as often?

16th
Jan. × ’10

I noticed that on my Mac Pro running 10.5.8, with Google Notifier version 1.10.6.879 I was experiencing long delays between checks.  It seems the moment I updated to this version it was waiting for long periods of time to check my email.  Sometimes I would have to manually force it to check, or go to [...]

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3Dmation MoCon – I love it

8th
Dec. × ’09

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 [...]

Posted in Maya | 5 Comments

Saving .ma files

8th
Dec. × ’09

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 [...]

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