Blender Camera Rig Add-on

I am starting to create a bunch of tools for Layout Artists to use whilst working in Blender. Similar to my Maya Simple Camera Rig, I have started first by building a Blender Camera Rig. This is not going to be as ‘simple’ as the Maya rig as I plan to build a whole bunch of functionality into this rig. So watch this space for updates!

The Goal

The goal here was to lay the foundation for a simple camera rig, that accomplishes as much as possible. Lets call it the Minimum Viable Product. It is intended to be used by layout artists seeking a fast, capable camera control system. It is fully functional, however not yet production tested. I am hoping this camera rig can be dropped into any pipeline as it has no dependencies, however my future scripts will be designed to function with this camera rig specifically.

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Maya Camera Rig Builder Script

So this is going to be a bit more of a code based post. Although I am not going to diving into the code perse. At the time of writing, the plan was to copy the code right here into the post, but as I write this I think maybe linking off to my gitlab account might be the best idea. That way any updates I make to it will be immediately available.

Goal with the Script

The goal here was to build a very simple camera rig, that accomplishes as much as possible. Lets call it the Minimum Viable Product. It was intended to be used for a training course teaching beginners the ins and out of being a layout artist. I wanted something that mimicked closely what I like to use professionally, but with all the bells & whistles removed. It is intended to be pipeline agnostic and thus its pretty bare bones.

That said, it is fully functional.

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Timecode in Animation Editing

Timecode is an interesting topic. It is too often neglected/forgotten and thus can cause issues down the line when conforming the edit with the highres .exr image sequences. Lets just go through some terminology quickly and then dive into it.

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Maya to Houdini Camera Conversion

I have recently been working on a new pipeline that has moved away from using Maya as the core DCC. Instead we decided to move dressing, lookdev and lighting to Houdini. This has pushed us to require accurate cameras within Houdini using Arnold, and after some investigation here are a few tips to guide you on your way.

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Linux Up Skill Challenge 03

Wow here we are on week 3 of the r/linuxupskillchallenge.

I will admit I did not keep up to date with my blogs of the course, so I am retroactively covering the material again to not only remember more but also update the log posts.

Linux Up Skill Challenge 02

So I am continuing with my journey through the r/linuxupskillchallenge.

Day 6 – Editing with “Vim”

Wow, this editor is weird man! Normal Mode and Insert Mode. I am busy working my way through the vimtutor, and finding it really interesting the decisions and use cases. Starting to understand the creators logic behind all the commands. I found the graphical vi-vim cheat sheet very useful.

Linux Up Skill Challenge 01

So spending a lot of time on reddit and if you interested in Linux in anyway you are probably following r/linux in which case you have seen the posts saying that r/linuxupskillchallenge is starting again. A have clicked the link a few times to see what its all about. I generally hit a wall when they want you to sign up for a cloud hosted server, and yes I could grab my Rapsi and setup a server very easily so why haven’t I done it yet? Well a few reasons, procrastination is real, finishing a movie and heading up the development of a new pipeline at triggerfish animation.

Vector Displacement

Its been many years since I have used my wordpress blog but decided (for some reason that may eventually come to me) too start posting a few more things again.

Suffice to say this is just a short post since #Nodevember got me all excited to learn the power of Blenders procedural shader networks. Honestly though it didn’t start out well. I began not really trying to make any specific shape or with a goal in mind, but with the desire to understand what each node did and how it influenced the output. You will see what resulted was some strange tent type shape where the colours are defined by the geometries position in 3D Space.

Missing/Rogue Materials in 3DS Max Scenes

Recently I was on a mission to cleanup the regurgitated mess that is the console.log file. It was complaining that 3 DTS file were searching for 2 specific textures… anyway, this sometimes happens……

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XRef and My Workflow

Sometime ago I wrote two posts on the topic of XRefs (3ds Max Externally Referenced File) in Max. I have come to the ‘near’ end of my current project and thought it was time to share some of the Pro’s and Con’s of the XRef system and my current Workflow…….

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