The Truth be, I haven't been very lazy

I wish I had been but I wasn't, so now that I am back home and not in a school environment anymore (I graduated ). I'll be putting up what I've been working on for the week here. Just have look at what I've done lately :

dvRenderCurve Script:
A script that creates geometry that match your curves, so you can render them out with Mental Ray



shadingLighting Script:
A small toolset that has some commonly used tools by shading and lighting artists, as asked for by a friend



facialGui Script v. 1.0:
An automated facial gui system based on blendshapes so that students can see how their blendshapes are interpolating with one another in a more "sophisticated" system.



nukeRender Script v. 1.0:
A script for a project with ESPN, the purpose is so all they have to do is hit a button to change a text in nuke, re-render all their shots with the new text and turns the image sequences into a movie file. This is the portion of the script that edits and makes the new Nuke files. The script has been updated some more since this video went live, new video coming soon.



Work In Progress


This is the Renamer Script version 2 ! Right Now I am going through and making sure all the functions of the layout are working before implementing the renaming code into it, which will be the easy part. The new script is a complete overhaul from the original, since then I have learned more about object oriented programming , regular expressions, file management , and much more. I will be implementing all these new concepts to the new script, thus making it more professional and useful. Did I mention it follows PEP 8 now ?



I will also be redoing the rig for this model by my friend Kyle Havrilesko, which is going to be a lot of fun !

Other than that, I am also going to be messing around with Fur and Hair systems some more, will put up results when I get them , keep working on my rig builder, and other work that I have coming my way. Anything that I can put up here will be here :)

The dvRenderScript and shadingLighting scripts will be up on creativeCrash.com once they are approved by them and if you want to check Kyle's Site , it's www.awesomeharvey.com

Take Care !

- David

Pro Tips I which existed

In my travels in the land of python, I have come across some information that wasn't easy find or clear up, so here is what I learned:

* To create a File , you just have to use the file.open(file_name, "w") command and give it a name that doesn't exist. This applies for creating files with any other commands, such as XML or Pickle, except that with a Pickle it's pickle.dump().

* If you are trying to create a Folder, you have to look up how to create a Dictionary (And I don't mean a dictionary to store data a.k.a {} ). Prior to Windows, folders were called dictionaries. The command is os.mkDir by the way

* To edit a single object in a list, you can just do list[1] = new value, instead of having to use the remove and insert commands

Dragon Face Deformation

The First Render Pass for the Facial Animation for the dragon I rigged. I plan on making the skin slide so that it feels more realistic. More stuff to come soon, as well as breakdown of the Dragon Rig.


-Model by X5sunu
-UVs by Nathaniel Stuart Harrison
-Texturing by Landon Gin
-Rig by David Vega
-Animation by Devon Roderick

Revamping Scripts: The First

Hello out there again! Now that I have entered the last leg of my college run and have starting working on my demo reel assets, I have started to take the time to go back and rework my older scripts not only to make them more efficient but to learn more about scripting itself and the commands maya lets you play around with. So here is my Renaming Tool I revamped and used to learn more about how the formLayout works for future endeavors:

Rename Script from David Vega on Vimeo.

Link to Script:
Basic Renamer Script

Lattices, Deformers, and Attributes

Growing Grapes Veins and Bottles - Rigging and Lighting from Florian Witzel on Vimeo.

Last week a friend showed me this video while discussing about possible ideas for a rig I will be working on next month (So check back here when productions start, got it). The rig is going to be made in Maya, so  I had to try to reverse engineer the process to be able to apply it on what I wanted. After some of just messing around in maya trying out how lattices and other deformers worked, I came up with this:

Messing with Lattices, Wraps, and Attributes from David Vega on Vimeo.

Essentially you have the first object transfer over the vertex position to the second object, which is a duplicate of the first. This allows you to still be able to move the second object around while the first object acts like a bounding box. Then you apply a wrap deformer from the second object to the object you actually want to effect, so you now you can have it disappear or collapse into a single point and then have it form back up by just moving the second object.

Well see how this idea goes, until then enjoy !

My First Time

Do you remember your first time? The wonderfull feeling of jumping in with cold feet into something that is completely forgien to you but comforting at the same time. A wonderful event that left you marked wanting for more by the time it was done and that you would do again and again. I do, in fact this is my first time writting a blog here on blog spot and hopefully you the reader will also find pleasure in reading these tidbits of information that will hopefully be appearing here from now on. Until then, wallow in this monster of a short paragraph and enjoy it while you can, for more are sure to come.

Stay classy my friends,

- This Guy (The Writer)