Who knew?  Or maybe I’m just totally out of the loop.  Ok so probably the latter.  But anyway, looking at the details I dearly hope they’re not actually charging money for this.  Are they?  Compositing?  Cool to have in there – if you’re an indie film developer or work at a small post shop, but for the other 80% of users?

Meh, whatever.  I still haven’t had the time to catch up with the changes in 2009 (which broke pretty much every maya animation tool ever written)…  Man I so wish there was a realistic alternative.

Social networking technology. I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to these things. Its not that I don’t “get it”, I think its more that I’m a social client as opposed to a social vendor…

But alas, there are various friends and family who keep bugging me about it that I’ve decided to give in an earnest go. What relevance that has to this site – is that there is now my “twitter” stream in the sidebar, and those who are into that sort of thing can follow along.

The fact that this site has been pretty dormant the last 18 months doesn’t mean i haven’t been doing anything. They’ve just not been post worthy. But they may be more twitter worthy.

Its been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, or the toolbox.  So I thought it was high time to provide some transparency into this absence.

The main reasons for absence are fairly unsurprising life reasons.  In the last year my wife gave birth to our second child (a gorgeous little girl), and we bought a house.  The combination of a new dwelling to maintain (we were renting previously) and two children has sapped much of my free time.

And the second – more relevant reason to presumably most people who keep up to date with things around here – is the introduction of python into maya.  This has done a few things.  First off it has caused me to devote a bunch of time to exploring this new language, and discover what new things it allows me to do.  Which incidentally is A LOT.  And secondly it has meant that all the processes I had to bundle up the toolbox no longer work with the python scripts that I write, and any new scripts that I write are always done in python.

There are a couple of tools that I plan to release with the next iteration of the toolbox which are all written in python.  One of them is an extension to zooWeightSave.  It  is basically a positional/id based weight loading and saving scheme, but I haven’t actually seen one written yet that is fast, and stupidly easy to use.  Its basically used in exactly the same way as the current zooWeightSave – two buttons.  Save.  Load.  Although there are options, the default use case is just as easy as the current tool, but way more flexible.

The other is some ui.  Python makes it possible to write portable modular ui.  Writing modular ui in mel is essentially impossible because the only way to store variables that arent’ global is with things like docTags, and creating invisible code.  And then its difficult to scope any of this.  In python you just write a class, and you’re done.

Anyhoo, no timeline yet for this, but I’d like to get it out there sooner than later.  So keep your eyes peeled for new-ness.

Its no secret that i’m not a big fan of intellectual property.  I’ve had a few people ask me lately whether they’re allowed to use my tools, or alter my tools for various commercial uses, so i thought i’d make a post on the subject to clear things up.

The zoo tools are released under a pretty open license.  The basic upshot of this is – go nuts.  In fact, I don’t care what you do with them.  Use em in your production (whatever sort of production it is), give me credit, or don’t give me credit (although any credit recieved will indeed be welcomed).  Modify them to make em better and re-distribute if you want – although it’d be great to get any major improvements back into the core product.

Hell, sell em for all I care.  I don’t try to sell them because I would have to support them if I did that, and it means I would have to devote a significant part of my life turning the tools into a product, instead of just a collection of useful little scripts.  But if you think you can make a buck out of em – by all means give it a try.  I’d love a cut, but if you don’t want to give me one thats fine too.

Ideas are ideas – no one can own them.  If you have ideas on how to make these tools better, or make them more useful to the world, then by all means do so.  I would be a fool to stop you.

Enjoy!