Contest postponed

You know, I was afraid that I'd jumped on the contest idea a bit too soon.  Sure enough, I haven't had time to even wrangle the details together.  Conceptually it's all there, but there are several things that need to be put into place before I can kick it off, and it's just not gonna happen right now.  Heck, I haven't even had time to work on the update in a while.

My apologies for the premature announcement.  When it's actually to roll, you'll hear more.

Contest announcement delay

I thought I'd have the earlier part of this week to get ready for today's official kickoff of the tweenMachine Design Contest, but then life happened. I may have time to work on it before the weekend is out, but if not, it'll have to wait 'til next week. My apologies for the delay.

Announcing...

You know, I was thinking that the tweenMachine Facebook page needs some art.  I was also thinking that with the new Python version of tweenMachine coming, maybe it's time to get a new shelf button icon as well.  Thinking about those two thinks spawned another think, one that I hope will be fun and interactive.  So without further ado, it's time to announce...

The tweenMachine Design Contest!

The tweenMachine Design Contest will present a unique challenge for graphic designers, and a unique opportunity to have your designs seen in multiple locations, both in Maya and on the web.

What's so unique about it?  Well, the contest centers around the creation of two images, each serving a dual purpose...

• Image 1 will be used as the new official tweenMachine shelf button icon in Maya AND as the profile image on the tweenMachine Facebook page.
• Image 2 will be used as a header graphic for the new "About" dialog in the upcoming tweenMachine update in Maya AND as the cover image on the tweenMachine Facebook page.
• Both images will also likely be used in other places as well: web sites, documentation, etc.

The images will need to be created based on very specific guidelines, so don't start on anything yet.  I will announce the full contest details when it officially kicks off on August 1st.  Stay tuned for more!

AnimSchool!

Okay, I feel just a little embarrassed.

In the last post, I ended with a teaser about a possible teaching opportunity, saying that I would share "more on that later."  I guess that I got so wrapped up in actually doing it that I forgot to come back later and write about it.

In early April, I began teaching the inaugural Intro to Maya class with AnimSchool.  I was approached about the opportunity by my friend Tony Bonilla, who works as the curriculum manager for AnimSchool in addition to teaching several classes.  It didn't take much prodding for Tony to convince me that this could be a fun opportunity, so I took the plunge.  As of this writing, the term is nearly over, and I can definitely say that it's been a great experience, and I'm looking forward to the next term, which kicks off in July.

One of the perks that the students get at AnimSchool is a full recording of every live class lecture.  Little did I know that Tony and friends would take one of these lectures and turn it into a short promo video for the course.   I guess I should have seen it coming.  ;)

Winnin' with minions

One of the final projects that I worked on at Reel FX before making the jump was "Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem," a ride film for Illumination Entertainment and Universal Studios.  It was a blast getting to work with Gru, the girls, and of course the ever-present minions, but it was quite a challenge at several levels, and many of the technical hurdles came across my desk at various points throughout the project's production.  I specifically remember spending several incredibly-late nights at the studio, feverishly cranking on code or troubleshooting problematic playblasts.  To say that I've got mixed feelings about the project is an understatement, so it was quite gratifying to surface from fixing some elusive technical issues on a freelance programming job to find reports that "Minion Mayhem" won for Best Animated Special Production in the Annie Awards!

Congratulations to all of my friends and former co-workers who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the job.  Y'all done good, gang.  :)

Fixing Toolbar Issues in Maya 2012

One of the guys at work came to me with an odd problem: he couldn't get the Tool Settings dialog to appear. Clicking the middle button in the upper-right corner of Maya's main window normally makes this dockable dialog pop into view just to the left of the main viewport. In this case, it just made the viewport edge shift ever-so-slightly from left to right. It didn't create the usual drag bar, so we couldn't force the width using the mouse. Restarting Maya did no good. After digging into the UI elements, I found that the width of the dialog's main formLayout was at 0. However, forcing it to a different value did absolutely nothing.

I was pretty sure that Autodesk had to have created a way of keeping track of all those nifty dockables in Maya 2012, and it took a while to figure out where they put it. While the file where this data is stored is not exactly formatted for human eyeballs, I was able to read a bunch of things like "dockState," "dockControl," "dockWidget," and "toolBar", though, so I was pretty confident that I had the right thing. We closed Maya, renamed the file, opened Maya, and presto! The Tool Settings panel was working again!

If you run into this problem, the file in question is named "startupMainWindowState", and is the lone file stored in Maya's prefs/mainWindowStates folder. As I said above, it's not anything can can be edited manually (at least not easily). However, Autodesk did create a simple way to save and load the settings contained in this file. In the windowPref command, there are a couple flags that do the job: saveMainWindowState and restoreMainWindowState. If you make your own dockable windows or toolbars, those commands should let you save and restore their state so that you don't have to manually re-position them every time you make them. I haven't tested them yet, but I plan on doing so tomorrow, and will update this post with my findings.

tweenMachine Tangent Error

I recently began receiving reports of a tangent-related error in tweenMachine:

// Error: Unrecognized tangent type. Use spline, clamped, linear, flat or step. //

With the help of one of the guys at work, I determined that this will occur when you're trying to add a tween key outside the range of an attribute's current keyframes; i.e. if you try to add a tween key to an object on frame 105, but the object's first keyframe isn't until frame 110. Because there's no previous key to reference for the tangent type, the tangent type in the script will remain undefined, and Maya will complain when applying the tangent.

I hope to eventually add an elegant solution for this problem. For now, the workaround is just to make sure that all objects that you're trying to tween have keys both before and after the frame where you want the tween key to appear.

tweenMachine 2.03

tweenMachine 2.03 is published. It fixes a problem that has prevented Maya versions in the 200X series from using the special tick color feature. If you run into any issues, drop a note here (still haven't got the contact page on my site updated yet).