Spore Creator Released

The long awaited game/simulation called SPORE has finally been released... well not really all of it. The Spore Creator is the companion to Spore which allows you to create a wide array of original creatures. There is a huge library of parts( arms, legs, eyes, fins...) that are used to design original 3d and fully rigged organisms. It's great fun.

It would be great if there was an exporter that allowed these creations to be used in 3d apps like Maya. Are you listening Electronic Arts?



Spore the game/simulation is due in September. It is a PC game' which is a bit odd. It will also be available for Nintendo DS and Mobile devices. I can't imagine it won't be ported to the consoles as well, but right now it's apparently not planned. Here is some other info about Spore Creator.



With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Or if you prefer, spend as much time as you like making creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships with Spore’s unique Creator tools.
CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic - From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.
EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.
EXPLORE your world and beyond - Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?
SHARE with the World - Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.

Maxwell Render is Updated

Next Limit Technologies announces an update to Maxwell Render. The new version Maxwell Render 1.7 adds new features and enhancements. I covered Maxwell Render in Chapter 4 of Maya Plugin Power. Anything that Next Limit does is of superior quality. Check it out and get yourself a demo version. You can download a pdf user guide to new features in v1.7 HERE.

This latest update, which is available now for existing customers, offers several new and vastly improved features including:A new Physical Sky system: several real-life, physically accurate parameters can be used to control the look of the sky and the resulting light in the scene, ranging from common Earth values to exaggerated fantasy skies. A new Sub-Surface Scattering component: SSS simulates the effect of light entering a translucent object and scattering inside it. Fully rewritten, the Maxwell SSS component follows an entirely new approach compared to the old system or to any other SSS system currently available. Enhancements in the Material Editor: incremental updates in the material preview, storing material swatches, new image controls, wizards, and more. An easier-to-use and faster Material Editor. Plug-in enhancements: all available plug-ins have been updated to ensure full compatibility with version 1.7, and have seen improvements and bug fixes. Improvements in Maxwell Studio: texture handling and memory optimizations, Realtime OpenGL preview of Physical Sky, improved material browser, and much more. Maxwell Render 1.7 and the updated plug-ins are available for download from the customer download area. All Maxwell Render customers will receive an email with the new link. The public release of Maxwell Render 1.7 will take place some days after the client release, when the demo will be re-enabled so that non-clients can test drive the new version.

New Texturing Tools from RenderHeads

I stumbled upon these two helpful plugins and wanted to mention them here. You can see some video demos of them in action HERE. Check them out and get a trial.

Autodesk Maya Plugin - UVAutoRatio Pro

Overview
To get the most out of textures they should be mapped in proportion to the size of the geometry. Not doing so means that different parts of the scene will have different texture distribution, resulting in some textures appearing blurrier than others while some will be overly sharp, making the scene appear inconsistent and strange. Those objects with too much texture mapped to them waste memory and cause aliasing (flickering) due to the overly high frequency of texels.
Artists in the game and film industry can spend hours scaling UVs up and down manually trying to get them to the ideal proportion. This isn't a particularly fun job, in fact it's not something we should be wasting our time with. Wouldn't it be great if this tiresome task was automated?
Enter UVAutoRatio Pro: the complete tool for automating all texel ratio tasks.

Features

Very fast algorithm! Can quickly process thousands of objects/shells and very high polygon meshes.
Simple and flexible workflow. Just a few clicks to wield supreme power.
Operates on both meshes and UV shells.
Automatically fixes overlapping UV shells in a non destructive manner.
Maintains usage settings between sessions.
Compatible with all modern versions of Maya.
Windows installer for painless installation.
Unit-aware. No matter what distance units you're using it will give the correct results.
Professional support.

Autodesk Maya Plugin - SD_polyColorPerVertex

SD_polyColorPerVertex is a plugin command for Maya for advanced vertex colour manipulation. It was written to complement a tool by David Berenguer Viaplana called SD_vertexColorsPro2. David's script allowed artists to manipulate colours in real-time and was great for rapid user feedback. It was written in MEL though, and thus suffered severe slowdowns on anything but the simplest meshes.
This plugin command was written to cope with performing vertex colour manipulation on large meshes in real-time. While working on this we decided to add a few other features such as: randomise, contrast, levels, blur, dilate, erode and support for more selection types.

Features

RGB & HSV (and alpha) replace operation
RGB & HSV (and alpha) relative operation
Written for speed
Effects: contrast, levels
Filters: blur, dilate, erode
Supports all selections: object, face, edge, vertex, vertex-face, vertex-face on edge and face

The Gashlycrumb Tinies

I meant to have this post for Friday the 13th... but... ummm... well... it was Friday the 13th and things got in the way.

I am working on a project right now that made me think of one of my favorite artists. I always loved the pen and ink styling of Edward Gorey and the gothic genre. Here is a link to the 28 odd pages of alphabet drawings that constitute the "Gashleycrumb Tinies". It's my favorite book by Gorey. I have always been influenced by his unique work. Check out Amphigorey and other Gorey books HERE. It's macabre fun.

Maya Open Source HDR image readers

Cryogenic Graphics has released HDRFlowMaya2008. This open source code is a collection of floating point image readers for Autodesk's Maya 2008. Originally supported on OSX only it is now available for XP/Vista. It supports ILM's OpenEXR, DPX, TIFF, HDR and digital camera's RAW formats.

HDRFlow is a open source framework and application to process and capture high-dynamic range (HDR) and RAW images. It is written in C++, and is both cross-platform and hardware accelerated on modern GPUs.

It is in development and current features include:

- Multiple channel playback
- Real-time hardware based pan and zoom
- GPU based visualisation tools
- Extensive Python scripting
- Look up tables support

SIGGRAPH 2008 Advance Program is available now.

The SIGGRAPH Advance Program is available for download. It's a .pdf file. Check it out. It's a good way to check out whats in store this year and helps you plan your assault on the conference in LA. There are changes to the levels of participation this year so read it carefully. I think the changes are smart ones.

Remember that the advanced registration deadline is July 4th. It will save you a little money registering prior to this date.

Voice-O-Matic Automatic Lip Sync for Maya Characters

I love a good catchy name but Voice-O-Matic makes me feel like dicin' and slicin' veggies. I suppose the product name is no reflection about how well a software program functions... Look at the Video Toaster. It started a revolution. I have not had a chance to toy with VOM so I can't really comment. The product was ported from 3D Max. The company Di-O-Matic has a slew of O-Matic plugins and software for Max. VOM and VOMbatch are their first attempts at gaining some of the Maya marketshare.


The Voice-O-Matic website can be found here
You can get a video Demo here.

VOM has some impressive features. If anyone has a chance to use it. Let me know what you think.


- Complete phonetic support, use up to 40 different phonemes
- Support most languages, including English, French, Spanish, Japanese and
others
- Intelligent smoothing, to get better lip synchronization results
- Weight-able Visemes Intensity, easily set emphasis on any given Visemes
- Standard keys creation, so animations can be modified easily
- Custom tangents type, change the keyframe tangents type
- Audible phoneme audio cues, hear the phonemes pronunciation
- .lwv file support, use LISET from Microsoft to process the audio recognition
- Scripting support, to easily fit in your pipeline
- Float Licensing, so you can share license(s) across your network.
- Batch Processing, VOMBatch exclusively available to VIP members