Gold Ingots Made in Mudbox

Gold is expensive, and quite hard to come by. And on top of that, even if you can get your hands on two fine bars, it's quite hard to photograph. CGI to the rescue! Gold bars are formed by pouring molten gold in a open cast, this process makes the bottom of the ingot organic in it's feel, and highly imperfect. Marcus got this little project on his desk, he used Mudbox to model the organic feel of the raw gold. He then imported the bars into Maya and designed a shader with a dark material and high reflection. A bump map made the rest. The Stamp on top is the ancient alchemy symbol for gold.  

Mats then used the render as a part of this ad made up from 6 individual images, 3 of which were video frames. The ad ran in several media, today 28:th of june in GP. 

The ad features Karlsborgs fortress in the middle of sweden, where the gold reserve was to be kept in times of war during the 19th century. 

Customer:  Karlsborg Turism

Modules in Maya 2011

We have an extensive set of custom written tools for our main 3D app Maya. Most of the tools are written in the programming language Python, which is a great language and it's very quick to get from idea to finished tool.

Previously we have added several paths to the "Maya.env" file manually to have Maya find all scripts, icons and so on. Last week we found out that a module can be made of the whole package, saving us the hassle of pointing several paths to the tools. Now we only have to set the "MAYA_MODULE_PATH" variable to point at the tool kit which should contain four folders (icons, plug-ins, presets and scripts) and one file with a description of the module. The last file can be named anything but have to have a line like this:

+ MFXTools 1.0 /Volumes/Projects/Scripts/MFXToolsDev

That's all it takes, a very clean and flexible solution!

Using Growl with Maya

We are using Mac computers at MFX, and with that we also use Growl, a handy notification tool. Growl simply displays a short message on different events, for example when skipping to the next track in Spotify.

Now we are also using it for reminding the artist when a rendering is done in Maya! This is achieved by having Maya call a Growl utility called "grwolnotify" as a "Post Render MEL" command. The command is simple:

system("/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n \"Maya\" -a \"Maya\" -t \"Rendering completed\" -m \"" + `file -q -sn -shn` + "\"");

The notification can be seen in the bottom of the screen shot, but the style of Growl notification can be of all kinds, even by email.