AREA Blogs Feed

Join us at the International Autodesk User Group on July 23rd!

Cory Mogk — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:46:24 UTC

On Tuesday, July 23rd, join us in Anaheim, CA where Autodesk will be hosting a live International User Group Event. Come to an evening of drinks, food and special presentations in a great atmosphere. Hear from industry visionaries in the film and games industry, connect with Autodesk staff and executives, see the latest product demonstrations, and network with your peers. If you can’t make it to Anaheim, follow us here on AREA where we’ll be posting new content daily. Registration is required. We hope to see you there!

Creativity is Something to Celebrate!

Cory Mogk — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:03:53 UTC

Autodesk Media and Entertainment brings you a new industry magazine called Celebrating Creativity. Celebrating Creativity brings you recent award-winning work, industry articles and more. In this new interactive issue, you'll get the latest on the evolution of the 3D industry, catch 3ds Max and Maya tips and tricks from experts Fred Ruff and Daryl Obert, and learn what it's like to work at the amazing HALON Entertainment. Get your free digital magazine today!

Mastering the Entertainment Creation Suite Workflows

Cory Mogk — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:57:34 UTC

Hopefully you're aware of the Softimage, 3ds Max and Maya Learning Channels on YouTube! These channels all have playlists. If you want to get the most out of everything available to you in the Entertainment Creation Suite check out the Interoperability playlists that I've conveniently added here for you.

Some of the highlights you'll see in these tutorials include:

Ptex workflows between Maya and Mudbox with mental ray
Using Mudbox with Maya or 3ds Max
Converting a CAT rig from 3ds Max to Maya or MotionBuilder
Working with 3ds Max and MotionBuilder
Using the FBX Converter
Sending data between Maya and Softimage with ICEflow
Working with OpenEXR in Composite
Taking MatchMover data into 3ds Max

Please let us know in the comments if there are other workflows you would like us to share more information about!

Vico Sharabani on the Flame 20th Anniversary Edition: Letting Go of the Past

Bill Ennis — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:46:02 UTC

We are pleased to welcome back Flame artist and Right-Brain of The Artery VFX, Vico Sharabani, as guest editor. Vico has been sharing with us his journey with the 20th Anniversary Edition of Flame Premium. In this, his second blog post, Vico talks about letting go of the past and moving the 20th Anniversary Edition into his commercial pipeline.

I'm happy to be back on the Flame Premium Can Do That AREA blog to report on our latest step of adopting the Flame 20th Anniversary Edition for production. I will share the latest steps we took and the results we produced.

If you haven't made the move to the new software yet, I hope you'll find our experience valuable when planning your own upgrade. If you've already made the move, you'll probably see yourself in the following paragraphs ;-)

At The Artery VFX, the transition to the new workflow was a carefully managed process over the past six months. While we were early adopters of the redesigned software in its infancy (late last year), we were still quite risk averse. Our approach was to learn the new workflow while using it on feature-films where the pace of work is slower than commercials. This worked great for us as we benefited from the power of the new MediaHub and its scriptable export functionalities.

Vico working on Flame 20th Anniversary Edition at The Artery VFX

Today: Service Pack 3 provides the stability needed for commercial work
Autodesk recently shipped service pack 3 which is a stable, more powerful and production-ready version of the software. This release has allowed us to begin deploying the new Flame in our commercials pipeline, where the editing tools are even more valuable, and interactivity is so important.

The accelerated performance, the critical feedback you now get about what’s happening in Backburner, and the UI enhancements together with the feature developments, let us take on two advertising campaigns in client sessions. And Flame's new way of handling EXRs has proved to be incredibly valuable and fast in our first commercial. It has meant that the work from our 3D artists can be immediately updated and reviewed. Combined with the powerful relighting tools of Action, this gave us the interactivity our commercial clients are so used to.

Test-driving the new workflow on film work

Some of you may have seen my demos at NAB 2013 or the M&E Meet the Experts global webinar. In these presentations, I shared my different explorations in the new workflow: organizing assets in the timeline or as standalone composites, stacking up different versions, new possibilities that opened up with the MediaHub, and some creative tools.

While I received favorable feedback from viewers, I feel these were the first steps of migrating to the new workflow. At that time the software was not so stable, however we made a managerial decision to test the new Flame on film work, where the pace is less demanding than it is for commercials. In a way, the time we had to invest in adapting to the new software was balanced out by the faster work.

This turned out great for us, as many of the new features and architecture allowed us to push massive amounts of work through our facility. The experience taught us how to manage assets and versions for a single shot with a single sequence. We are now applying the same idea in the commercial and music video world where a single sequence can powerfully hold the entire production.

The results were quite astonishing. In just a few months, we completed hundreds of shots, working on high profile feature films.

The 20th Anniversary Flame experience

With Service Pack 3, we feel stability is finally there. As Cedric Lejeune (from Workflowers) said on Facebook, "This is the real 20th Anniversary Edition". I tend to agree. This version is much closer to the original, buttery feel we Flame artists love so much.

I would conclude that Flame allows us as a small group of artists to manage many tasks with large amounts of data. Working with a small team fits our philosophy as it simplifies the management of any given project.

My next and final blog post will be my last report in this journey, and will cover the conclusions after delivering our two campaigns.

See more of Vico's journey here on the blog, at NAB 2013, and through his Meet the Experts Webcast.

A taxi scene from the film "A Late Quartet" starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener

Maya OpenData and Scene Assembly Workflows

STLR — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:15:32 UTC

Howdy folks -

I've got some new Scene Assembly demos for you. But first a quick and completely unrelated joke...

Two cannibals are eating a clown.

One turns to the other and asks...

"Does this taste funny to you?"

Now back to bidness :)

I've recorded a couple of new movies to share with you related to Scene Assembly. In the 2014 release we extended Scene Assembly to help deal with managing multiple representations of characters, rigs, animation, etc... I put together a few examples to show Scene Assembly in the context of what we are calling Character Assemblies.

Character Assemblies in Maya 2014

[video]http://youtu.be/LnAE_RlxYWk[/video]

Additionally we've posted a recording of a recent webinar that I hosted that covered not only Scene Assembly but the broader Maya OpenData initiative. Check out this extended movie to learn more about it.

Maya OpenData and Scene Assembly Workflows

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsn6i1YVZo8&feature=share&list=PL8AC2262DEF98303E[/video]

Smoke 2013: the basics

Marc-Andre Ferguson — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:00:00 UTC

It was almost a year ago that Smoke 2013 Pre-Release Trial 1 was available to the public. Smoke trainer Grant Kay had published a series of training videos for newcomers, but Smoke has evolved much since then.

New users of Smoke can enjoy a fresh new version of the Getting Started series of videos, focusing on the new Extension 1 release.

Enjoy!

Smoke 2013 Getting Started Playlist on YouTube and on iTunes.

EUE 2013!

delisef — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 05:27:23 UTC

Hi all,

Dont forget EUE 2013 is here!

As usual the team there is setting up a great event with an amazing speaker lineup.

Check it out here,

Maya Bonus Tools Resource Page (Update - 3DsImport plugin available for Mac)

STLR — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 18:10:07 UTC

- Welcome to the Maya BonusTools Resource Page -

Here you will find links to installers, useful information, tutorials, demonstrations and updates related to Maya BonusTools. This page will be continually updated with new information, so bookmark it and check back later for more updates.

- BonusTools 2014 Installation -

The 2014 version of BonusTools is now available for download. Going forward we will be posting the installers on the new Autodesk Maya Apps Exchange -> BonusTools 2014 Installers. The Exchange is a portal hosted by Autodesk where you can get access to plugins that extend the functionality of various Autodesk products. There are now both Maya and Max centric pages on the Exchange.

NOTE: We have fixed the legacy issue with the BonusTools python scripts path. You no longer need to set this up manually. It is now done automatically, so all python based Bonus Tools should work imediately after installation.

- BonusTools 2014 Update -

We've had a few requests for the 3dsImport plugin which was not included in the 2014 version of BonusTools.

The compiled windows (mll) version of the plugin -> Windows 3dsImport Plugin

The compiled Mac (Bundle) version of the plugin -> Mac 3DsImport Plugin

Unzip the file and put the 3dsImport.mll (Win) or 3dsImport.bundle (Mac) file in the plugins folder where BonusTools 2014 is installed. See documentation for more details on installation location.

- Legacy BonusTools Installers -

BonusTools installers for older versions of Maya can still be found on the Area -> Legacy Maya BonusTools Installers (Keep in mind that older versions will not contain all of the current toolset)

NOTE: In older versions of BonusTools python based tools will not work after the initial installation (e.g. Flatten Components.) Python scripts required an additional setup step for versions prior to 2014. See the BonusTools help docs for instructions on how to setup your Python search path. You only need to do this once and it should work from then on.

Fixes for the DrawSplit and DrawReduce tool are available for BonsuTools 2013. This update addresses an issue that was preventing the tools from being listed in the menu for MacOS as well as an issue with the default options for the tools. Put the contents of this zip file in the scripts folder of the BonusTools installation -> BonusTools 2013 Update1. These fixes are already integrated into the 2014 version.

- BonusTools Tips, Tricks and Tutorials -

What's New in -> BonusTools 2014?

Modify

Paint Geometry Tool

Create

Windows

Modeling

UV Editing

Animation

Rendering

Change Texture Paths / Organize Files (retired)
Fur Blender

MatchMover crash with Automatic Tracking

MaxStation — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 18:05:03 UTC

If you experience crashes when attempting Automatic Tracking in Matchmover, please try these steps:

Start MatchMover
Invoke Windows Task Manager
Select the Process tab
Select MatchMoverApp.exe
Right click it and choose Set Affinity
Turn off all CPU’s higher than 6 (6, 7, 8, 9, etc) on each Node 0 and Node 1

M&E Live Webinars Series: Meet the Experts

Ken LaRue — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:32:04 UTC

Hi Everyone,

There is a new Smoke Webinar happening on Tuesday June 11th and I highly recommend watching it if you can. I know Rob very well through working at Autodesk and I had the pleasure of meeting Nicky when I visited Australia a couple years ago. He is a very talented Smoke artist and this webinar will be very informative. The info is below:

Join Autodesk Expert Rob O’Neill and Nicky Liddell from boutique post house, Concrete Wednesday in Melbourne, Australia as they examine the work involved in putting together budget-conscious retail commercials.

Rob O'Neill and Nicky Liddell will show how the powerful creative toolset of Autodesk Smoke was used to finish budget-conscious retail commercials for Opel and Bayer.

During this hour-long in-depth session, we look at some of the techniques owner and Smoke Artist Nicky Liddell employed making these spots - from lighting and texturing in Autodesk® Maya® to editing, compositing, from fixing to finishing - a little bit of everything that Smoke has to offer!

Attend this webinar to find out how Smoke can help editors who want to do more than just edit.

Webinar will be in English only.

http://autode.sk/15vByIi

Meet the Experts webinar | June 11th

Marc-Andre Ferguson — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:06:33 UTC

Rob O'Neill and Nicky Liddell will show how the powerful creative toolset of Autodesk Smoke was used to finish budget-conscious retail commercials for Opel and Bayer.

Attend this webinar to find out how Smoke can help editors who want to do more than just edit.

Webinar will be in English only.

Smoke Signals, the series

Marc-Andre Ferguson — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 13:40:35 UTC

Episode 16: Smoke 2013 Extension 1
[video]http://youtu.be/g_67z4LGy-Y[/video]

Episode 15: 2013 Las Vegas Supermeet
[video]http://youtu.be/f4AseMgfxqw[/video]

Episode 14: An interview with director Jeremy Hunt on the making of Fix It In Post.
[video]http://youtu.be/8SD8yZY3lNI[/video]

Episode 13: Everything you need to know to acquire Smoke 2013, run it on your Mac, learn to use it and where you can ask questions
[video]http://youtu.be/c0YF8jda-CY[/video]

Episode 12: Smoke 2013 is shipping!
[video]http://youtu.be/GIbjN4ZF53o[/video]

Episode 11: An interview with the winner of the Scruffy Smoke Challenge, and Ken LaRue's Dynamic Editing training series. [video]http://youtu.be/z8KRsFiLDlA[/video]

Episode 10: Smoke 2013 Pre-Release Trial 4
[video]http://youtu.be/tWK09ZXl2Os[/video]

Episode 9: 2012 Amsterdam Supermeet and Smoke is BIG in Amsterdam
[video]http://youtu.be/TtC5Psqd03A[/video]

Episode 8: IBC 2012, part 2
[video]http://youtu.be/hUqvku9drlc[/video]

Episode 7: IBC 2012, part 1
[video]http://youtu.be/Yeq13wAqWZQ[/video]

Episode 6: Kanen Flowers and the Scruffy Smoke Challenge
[video]http://youtu.be/OrVLDsUPTZ8[/video]

Episode 5: New Conform tools
[video]http://youtu.be/btJrmUWyW34[/video]

Episode 4: Smoke 2013 Pre-Release Trial 2
[video]http://youtu.be/w8KflGSgo2o[/video]

Episode 3: Smoke for FCP editors
[video]http://youtu.be/LoP2_iSscIc[/video]

Episode 2: Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk
[video]http://youtu.be/8rOeg3W3gCk[/video]

Episode 1: Redesigning Smoke
[video]http://youtu.be/oDz7edwSupg[/video]

Back to business

Marc-Andre Ferguson — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 13:23:29 UTC

Greetings, Smoke aficionados.

I confess, I'm not a very good blogger. Case it point, my last update is almost a year old. I apologize to my readers; I was so caught up in creating video content for Smoke Signals and the Smoke web page, among other things, that I forgot to give this blog some love.

Recently, someone asked where they could find Smoke Signals episodes. I had to reply "YouTube" and "iTunes", realizing that Smoke Signals didn't have a home outside of those platforms. Hence the name change, from "Smoke & Dagger" to "Smoke Signals".

From now on, I'll be posting new episodes of Smoke Signals here, as well as other Smoke-related news. You can also watch it on YouTube, or subscribe to the series on iTunes.

Make sure to check back often, and feel free to post comments.

Cheers!

Windows crash during license authorization of Autodesk 2014 products

MaxStation — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 08:51:21 UTC

When trying to activate the software, you will get a fatal error and you will be prompted to submit a CER report.

The post on the UAR blog: Windows crash during license authorization of Autodesk 2014 product

The solution on Autodesk.com: Windows crash during license authorization of Autodesk 2014 products

The patch in the solution is only going to work if there is no serial number when you run the following command in a cmd shell: wmic bios get serialnumber.

Vein Brush

Duncan Brinsmead — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:14:59 UTC

Vein Brush

Here are some Paint Effects vein brushes similar to what I used in my Unfold presentation. Download the following folder "veins":

veins

Put it in your Maya brushes folder, for example:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\brushes

You can then find the brushes inside Maya: “Paint Effects: Get Brush”.

These are designed to be used with an object… if you simply paint on the ground they won’t work properly. So first select your object and do “Paint Effects: Make Paintable” before painting. If the brush is too big or too small hold the “b” key down while dragging the mouse to resize. Note that the brush in these cases does not appear correct until you finish painting (mouse up). For the most part one can just to a short quick stroke with these brushes in the general desired direction.

Paint effects with these brushes should be considered more as a modeling tool. If you paint on an animated deforming character, for example, you do not want the brush to compute during the animation because the structure of the branching will change and pop (not a bug, but rather the way the branching attempts to fill available space), as well as slow down the playback speed. Instead convert pfx to poly and delete the original stroke. Then attach the veins to the object depending on the requirements, for example with parenting, wrap deformer, or bind skin.

The critical brush attributes used for these presets are:

1. All the Occupation Surface attributes. Higher occupyAttraction attributes allows tubes to bend more when attempting to fill the surface.

2. Surface Attract

3. Surface Collide and Collide Method

4. Branch attributes. Note that with Occupy Branch Termination enabled one can set the Split Max Depth high without resulting in too many branches. Care needs to be taken, however, because with a high max depth anything that keeps the branches from terminating could result in a large number of branches( it shouldn’t kill Maya, but could lock it up for a few minutes). For example increasing the Attract Radius Offset could greatly reduce the number of terminated branches.

5. Hue Rand. This is set to get a range of colors between blue and red, with the base color being the middle, or purple.

These brushes are quite sensitive to the size of your object relative to the veins. If the object is much bigger than the veins then you may need to increase the Surface Sample Density on the brush (this can make the brush slower to compute, however).

Now, why didnt I think of that?

Bellsey — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:57:44 UTC

One of the many things I get asked when showing Softimage, is how can data from ICE work with, and be exported to something like Maya or Max. Well, Softimage supports Maya's nCache format so getting particle data out of Soft and in Maya is actually quite easy.

About a month ago, this video appeared shoing how you can cache ICE particles into Maya and have them drive Maya's fluids. Now, this is great, but one thing that people often want to send to Maya is Strands from Softimage ICE. Unfortunately you can't cached ICE strands to Maya, but you can (with the help of a compound) convert them to curves and then export them to Maya. Then once in Maya, you can use those curved to drive all kinds of different things, especially Paint Effects (which are awesome btw).

Well, the guy who produced the previous video has now gone one better and can now show us how to drive Maya Paint Effects using Softimage ICE Strands. Check this out, it's awesome......

[video]http://vimeo.com/67114459[/video]

When I saw this, it kinda appears obvious, and I don't know why I didn't think of it :-)

Has anybody seen my Civil View 2014?

Eddie Perlberg — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:33:25 UTC

To err is human, to forgive, divine. I hope that I appeal to the divinity in all of us.

With the release of the Autodesk Building Design Suite Premium and Ultimate 2014, the Civil View option in the installer is not activated. Thus, as you install 3ds Max Design, the Civil View Resource kit is not included. The result is the following error message when starting Civil View.

The good news is the development team is working on a fix for future installers of the Building Design Suite Premium and Ultimate

Those of us that have already installed can easily add the Civil View Resource kits by running the CivilView2014.msi.

If you installed using the downloaded installer set, navigate to the location that the files expanded to a find the installer. I found mine here: C:\Autodesk\Building_Design_Suite_Ultimate_2014_English_Win_32_64bit_dlm\x86\Components\CV

If you are running off of the Building Design Suite jump drive, it will be in the same place just instead on the location of that drive when you plug it in.

If you’ve already deleted these files from the hard drive, you can copy just the .msi from one location to the other or sneaker net it around the office.

While I can't speak for them, I know the development team would sincerely apologies for the inconvenience this may occur.

Populate High Res Skin

MaxStation — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:20:38 UTC

In order to use the High Res Skin option you need to install some additional data. The first time you use the feature you'll be taken to the download.

If you'd like to use this feature on multiple machines it may make sense to download it once and install it on all machines.

The direct download link is: http://areadownloads.autodesk.com/oc/hosting/autodeskpopulatehighres.exe

Amazing Maya Animation Tutorial!

STLR — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:06:00 UTC

Watch this animation tutorial and you are pretty much guaranteed to become a top notch animator!  

I think I need to start incorporating some of these techniques into my tutorials :)

[video]http://vimeo.com/67501143#[/video]

Iray samplers

MaxStation — Fri, 31 May 2013 10:35:23 UTC

In 3ds Max 2014 two samplers are available in the Solver Methods section of the Advanced Parameters of the iray renderer: the Architectural Sampler and the Caustic Sampler.

When used correctly they speed up the render, so what are the rules?

Architectural Sampler

Its strong point is indirect lighting. So if a scene mainly uses indirect light use this one.

Caustic Sampler

If you need caustic effects in your render you'll probably want to use this sampler. One exception (as mentioned on the iray dev blog): in a very detailed scene where most of the caustics aren't visible to the camera there.

Both

You can select both, would make sense if your scene has both caustics and indirect lighting.

None

A scene which is mainly directly lit and has no caustics or the caustics aren't visible to the camera won't benefit from these samplers being active. Quite likely the opposite, so don't use them.

Time for a little quiz: which sampler is used in the following images?

For the answers, larger versions of these nice example renders and more details see: The Architectual and Caustic samplers on the iray dev blog