so i received a number complaints about xferAnim not working in the latest release. not sure why it wasn’t working for folks, but i’ve re-released the toolbox with the latest crop of the tools - not much has changed since the last release (i think the biggest changes are to CST, with a few important changes to triggered) but from my testing xferAnim works just fine.
if people find otherwise - please POST to the forums, don’t email me directly. emailing me directly does give others visibility into the solution.
its true. you thought it’d never happen. 08.02 is finally a reality. it sadly isn’t the most amazing of releases, but it IS a release.
some of the highlights include - xferAnim now allows you to run post-trace commands, which can be useful for tracing objects that have different alignments. there isn’t a UI for editing post trace commands yet however… triggerator presets are alot more reliable now… finally. CST changes across the board. most of them minor improvements, but the default CST rig should be a bit nicer. i believe the stretchy arms are still a bit weird.
i haven’t included any of my python scripts in the release, but there is a python script in the SVN repository called keyUtils which has a bunch of useful animation related classes. classes such as Key, Channel, Clip and MotionPath. they still have a bit of work to be done on them, but eventually they should replace alot of the xferAnim functionality (if I can get pickle to work with the classes they’ll replace animFile as well).
anyway, given how little work i’ve done on the toolbox in the last year I can’t imagine releases will be any more frequent than a few a year. but do stay tuned.
oh and lastly, the release is now distributed as a 7-zip file instead of a .rar. 7-zip is a far superior archive format that is also open-source. get it here.
djx has a bunch of pretty awesome posts on his site about making some of the zoo tools even better (in many cases thats not really very hard - there are a lot of nasty edges in many of my tools). this one caught my eye just now. i don’t really follow his blog, but every now and then wordpress tells me of incoming links - christ knows how this blogging software can be so awesome… anyway, so wordpress told me about this post and dammit - I listened. and so should you. go check it out. i’ll be checking it out myself to see how it works, and most likely, ripping his idea off.
isn’t there a saying? good artists create, great artists steal… or something like that. google it.
so i’ve been a casual python user for a few years, but I’ve never really had that much to do with it - until we started using maya 2008 at work (i’ve been on v7 for a looong time now). as such, i’ve kinda never really thought about using anything but my trusty old text editor jedit to write python scripts in. but i recently stumbled across wing. talk about awesome. this is maya for python dev. its freaking awesome! its written in python, and there is a scripting interface to it - in python. you can do all the fancy crap that ide’s like visual studio do and more (like interactive debugging). plus if you’re a customisation freak like me, you can set hotkeys up the wazoo. plus it has such nice, clean prefs files too - so its easy to syncronise the wing environment between multiple machines using something like svn or whatever your version control system of choice is.
anyway - python integration in maya is the single best improvement i think alias have ever done. i’m not sure maya has actually been given a feature as useful as this since version 4. if you’re just starting to tinker with mel - i highly recommend ditching it, and learning python instead. its waaaaaaay more useful.
y’know, I was kinda figuring I’d weather this new OS out - I mean, after all in 5 years time I’m probably not going to have the choice of xp or vista, right?
but no. the time has come. this os is just shit. plain and simple. last night I was trying to play a dvd in my machine. how very low tech of me. now I’m no computer scientist, but to me, trying to watch a dvd shouldn’t HANG your ENTIRE computer, right? I mean ENTIRE. i could ctrl-alt-del and get the stupid menu to open task manager, but task manager would never arrive. and then the shell died, so I couldn’t do anything. I tried to get something happening for a full 10 minutes before giving up and hard rebooting my machine.
now, I’m a glutton for punishment, I thought - surely its a dirty disk and my dvd drive is cheap and causing the OS greif. so I cleaned it and tried again.
same thing. now even IF it was a dirty disk and even IF I have cheap crappy dvd hardware, isn’t vista supposed to stop this basic sort of shit bringing down your entire OS? maybe I just don’t get it…
i really wanted to avoid vista. but I also didn’t want to compromise on the hardware. and all of that meant I was stuck with vista. dell does offer xp still, but only on select machines, and I didn’t want those models. so anyway, i’m stuck with vista until I can muster the courage to try installing xp.
i gotta say how much of a step sideways its been so far. ubuntu really is looking soooo much more like an option. I just gotta see if I can realistically run a few apps under wine. one of the stupidest things thats happened so far is that I performed a copy of my music share directory off the network. it came up with an informative dialog box telling me how much it was copying, and how long it thought it’d be (not sure how it does math, but it said it was 30gig, copying at 25mb/sec and it was going to take 6 hours… not sure how that works). anyway, that was a nice step forward from xp.
but then the machine it was copying from died (actually accidentally turned off). so what would you expect to happen? an error dialog probably? nope. not even that. its still sitting there telling me it has 1 hour to go. furthermore, the machine has been back on the network for a few hours now (i’m streaming music off it right now through my sonos system) and vista still tells me that the machine is unavailable when I try to browse to it. I can ping it just fine. but I can’t browse to it. oh any the copy process hung. as in task manager doesn’t even kill it type hung.
now, I’m confused. isn’t copying pretty trivial these days? ubuntu does it really well. if the copy does, it throws up a useful dialog asking me whether I want to abort, or retry. so, i’m confused. when is the future of windows coming? coz vista can’t be it.
it is humbling working at a place like valve. this was a recent headline on one of the online industry rags. orange box beats halo3. sure, not everyone agrees. but there are heaps of articles around now that compare orange very favorably to halo3.
now, don’t get me wrong, halo3 looks like a reasonably nice game. its got some pretty graphics - in many parts its nicer than any of our games. but its pretty un-inspired. there’s nothing groundbreaking in there. there is no feeling, there is no compelling writing, and the multiplayer element is totally run of the mill.
it feels great to be apart of a company that can go up against the behemoth that is microsoft, and the marketing frenzy that is halo3 and come out on top. being a part of the process valve has developed for creating content is truly awe-inspiring, and humbling. the is the first company i’ve ever worked at where I’ve truly believed in the quality of the product we create.
the next installment of the tf “meet the team” videos. if you haven’t played tf2 yet, go and get it now. its one of the most fun, addictive multiplayer games in the known universe. plus its easy to jump into a game, play for half an hour and go do something else. well, theoretically anyway. as long as you have the willpower to tear yourself away.
yes folks its true. go over to steampowered right now and download the game and play the shit out of it. you won’t regret it.
y’know, as a boring side story, when I first started talking to valve about working there, I was a little skeptical. after all, they had only really done half life and its derivative games, and counter strike. both of which I thought were awesome games, but they were both fps games. fps games didn’t sound like fun to work on from an animators perspective.
I had traditionally worked on strongly character based games and films, at the time I didn’t feel that valve was really going to offer me any challenges as an animator or a tech animator. but I talked to them anyway, because they flew me over to seattle to see their city and their studio and WHOA! I was sold.
TF2 is one of the most enjoyable projects i’ve ever worked on as well as being one of the most fun games I’ve ever played, and valve has so far been the best studio I’ve ever worked at. So go and play Teamfortress 2 right now, because its just plain fun.
