Triple Switch in Maya

Triple switch for variance in color such as grapes. This tutorial is aged but it sure seems that nothing much has changed since.

http://misterdi.cgpot.com/tutorial/ShadingSwitch/shadingSwitch.html

Maya Mental Ray Flicker Free

I've been documenting about how to handle Vray flicker free and completely forgot about the process that helped me do flicker free work in MentalRay. It is quite sad given how much time I invested and how confident I got.

Well, the industry has moved on and seem to have built on that whole concept with write ups and all so I'll just tap on that to relearn. Flicker free, perfect for architecture visualization renders and now with the subset node, to handle the dynamic stuff. Awesome

Maya MR Flicker Free

A chunck of really helpful info from the above link so I can get my renders going quick

"To create a Frozen FG map, define a map first in the Final Gather File field (an extension name doesn't matter, though I use .fgmap), then enable the Preview Animation mode in the Preview section of the Options tab of the Render Settings. Preview Animation will render out your scene but won't save files in this case. You'll ONLY be calculating the FG map for your main rendering camera. To set the renderer to render only the FG pass, under the Features tab, set the Render Mode to Final Gathering Only. Image sampling (anti-aliasing and such) settings don't matter and will have no effect, since FG is being rendered only. Then under the Common tab, set the By frame attribute to a setting such as 10, or 5, there usually isn't a need to render every frame for the FG map, unless the camera view is covering a massive change per frame. Keep in mind that the pixel resolution of the image does matter, so you'll need to set that to your target output pixel resolution, also under the Common tab. Now render the current frame and Mental Ray will calculate the FG data for the length of the animation. Remember to switch Rebuild to Freeze and unhide any objects (such as your characters/creatures) you didn't want in the frozen FG solution when you're ready to render again. Here's a quick explanation on the Rebuild modes in Final Gather:

Rebuild On: Overwrites the FG map on every render, and with each frame advance at render-time.
Rebuild Off: Appends (adds) FG points to the map, as needed, without overwriting it.
Rebuild Freeze: Reads from the FG map, doesn't overwrite nor append anything to it.

Amnesia

I am a fucking moron, and each time I am lazy and do not take notes here. Whatever I learnt will be as if it never happened. *I've completely wiped from my head how to deal with flicker free animation in MentalRay

*note to self.

DO NOT FUCKING FORGET TO TAKE NOTES AGAIN, AND DON'T BE LAZY.

Applying Aim Constraint to multiple groups at once

string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;

for ($tmp in $sel) {

aimConstraint -offset 0 0 0 -weight 1 -aimVector 0 1 0 -upVector 0 1 0 -worldUpType "vector" -worldUpVector 0 1 0 Locator $tmp;

};

items in italics can be edited to suit requirement. "Locator" = name of target to orient towards.